Whatever you call it, the character/personnage is the person or person-like figure who acts and is acted on in the story. But languages other than English are biased towards the human here: ‘character’ is personaje in Spanish, personnage in French, personagem in Portuguese, personaggio in Italian, персонаж in Russian – the same word applies to a minor nobleman from La Mancha and a Dalek from the planet Skaro. Of course, the character doesn’t have to be human: it could be an animal, or a robot, or an alien. Not a direct verb in sight, no names or faces, only abstractions – and yet clearly two people are walking together, arguing, trying to make up, failing, until one of them is alone. Take this sixty-word wonder by Lydia Davis (it’s called ‘The Outing’):Īn outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes. But I challenge you to find a story – even the shortest – that doesn’t imply the presence of at least one other character too.
After all, there’s got to be someone telling the story: a narrative implies a narrator.
O ne of the things you can pretty much guarantee about fiction is that it will have people in it.
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