FORMS OF PRESENTATION: CHARACTERIZATION, DIALOGUE

Characterizationis used to present a character’s personality. We come to know the characters in the short story through the indirect method of 1) physical description, 2) the character’s thoughts, feelings and words, 3) the comments and reactions of others, and 4) the actions of the character — indirect characterization; and the direct method of the author’s stated opinion about the character — direct characterization.

A person in a short story is called a character. The person around whom the conflict revolves is called the main character. Most stories contain one or more main characters and several minorcharacters. The hero of the story who is faced with a conflict is the protagonist while the villain of the story, the person who causes the conflict is the antagonist.

Character Development is the change in the person from the beginning to the ending of a story. We say the character who changes in personality or attitude is a dynamic character, those that remain the same are referred to as static characters. A round character is a character with a fully developed, complex, even contradictory personality. A flat characteris a character with little depth or complexity, who may be described in one or two phrases. A foil character is a minor character highlighting certain features of a major character usually through contrast. The author’s mouthpiece is a character, expressing the author’s view point as to the problems raised in the story and sharing his ideas and set of values.

Dialogue is the speech of two or more characters who address each other. Verbal behaviour (the way a character speaks, or what a character says in a certain situation) is a powerful means of characterization, revealing the social and intellectual standing, age, education and occupation, individual experiences and psychology of a character. It also expresses his state of mind and feelings, the attitude to his interlocutors. When analyzing speech characteristics, one should be alert for:

· Markers of official style (I presume, I beg your pardon, etc.), or markers of informal conversational style: contracted forms, colloquialisms, elliptical sentences, tag constructions (as you know), initiating signals (Well, Oh), hesitation pauses, false start — pall of which normally occur in spontaneous colloquial speech and often remain unnoticed, but in “fictional conversation” they may acquire a certain function, as they create verisimilitude and may indicate some features of the speaker’s character;

· Markers of the emotional state of the character: emphatic inversion, the use of emotionally coloured words, the use of breaks-in-the-narrative that stand for silence, the use of italics, interjections, hesitation pauses;

· Attitudinal markers: words denoting attitudes (hate, adore, despise), intensifiers (very, absolutely, etc.);

· Markers of the character’s educational level: bookish words, rough words, slang, vulgarisms, deviations from the standard;

· Markers of regional and dialectal speech, which define the speaker as to his origin, nationality and social standing: foreign words, etc.;

· Markers of the character’s occupation: terms, jargonisms;

· Markers of the speaker’s idiolect, i.e. his individual speech peculiarities which serve as a means of individualization and verisimilitude.

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<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
Symphony in Yellow	\|	How to write a character sketch

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