Protagonist

“ Events or action presuppose actors, or characters as they are generally called, and a place where the action may take place; likewise time and circumstances within which the actors act. These three, which may be conveniently spoken of as actors, action, and environment, are three of the elements of narration. But there is a fourth. To make an interesting story there must be something for the chief character, technically called the protagonist, to overcome, such as an adversary, a situation, or an idea, which thing is called the obstacle. ”

“ With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists' lives beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. ”

“ Any charm of the story-tellers of the ages has entered into the body of the tale, which has become an objective presentment of a reality that concentrates on itself and keeps personality out of sight. ”

“ These are the epic poem, the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain end. In each men are represented, not as at rest, or in contemplative isolation, but in co-operation or collision. In each there is a combination of two elements, an outer element of incident, an inner of passion and character. ”

“ The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation; the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the variety of scene and incident—all most properly connected with the plot, but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue; the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all—these things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the born lover of the special novel-pleasure. ”

“ Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If you interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on a journey, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit and their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them afterwards, I do not call that a story. ”

“ It is based upon a plot that awakens curiosity and keeps it alive throughout. The hero and heroine are marked with individuality, the love-passages are finely drawn, and the story developed with judgment.”—The Civil Service Gazette. ”

“ We may still call the core of these two stories the Plot, if we want to, but Plan would be the more accurate. This part of the story answers the question What? Under the heading Characters or Character we study the personalities of the men and women who move through the story and give it unity and coherence. Sometimes, as in "The Christmas Carol" or "Markheim," one character so dominates the others that they are mere spokes in his hub or incidents in his career. ”

“ We are concerned with things that affect our lives, and secondarily with things that affect the lives of others, since what touches the fortunes of others is but a part of that complex web of destiny and environment [3] in which our own lives are enmeshed. In the story it is not so true as in the drama that, for the going out of our sympathies toward the hero or the heroine, there should be other contrasting characters; but a story gains color and movement from having a variety of individualities. ”

“ What the eye of the senses discovered in the physical world, the eye of the soul discerned to be true of the inner life. Character was not the child of Destiny, the shadow of Circumstance, it was the one immortal creation of which man was capable. “What a man sows, that shall he also reap.” In character was the harvest of all that a man ever thought, or willed, or did. ”

“ Many stories, of course, we begin with ‘Character-starts.’ Some of these come from clippings, like the following—‘Man who feeds nuts to squirrels,’ ‘Dead laborer was wealthy sociologist,’ ‘Former waiter becomes hotel manager.’ Members of the staff, also, turn in suggestions, like the following—‘The man with the wardrobe trunk,’ ‘Doubles in appearance but not in character,’ ‘Hero and centre of story who never appears.’ Gradually we are making up a canon of contemporary characters like the famous stock characters of the Roman or the Restoration comedy. ”

“ Throughout the story abounds in character-study of a kind that, while building up the figure with a thousand details, will add suddenly some vivid touch that brings the whole wonderfully and unforgettably to life. ”

“ When character is exemplified in a living person or is shown through story once to have had expression in a fellow mortal, interest is awakened and the child instinctively imitates the vision before him. ”

“ Nor can you dignify your hero's nature with a mere basket collection of the flying chips of life—a deed here, a word there, a desire at another time. First, then, discover the problem that your hero faced in the relation of his character to itself and to its times. ”

“ And here I may be pardoned for saying that I have been sadly constrained, in these my Confessions, to avoid, upon the one hand, any mention of those persons who merely exercised a passing influence on my fortunes, and yet to show by what agencies of personal acquaintanceship my character became formed and moulded. In a novel, the world would seem to consist of only the very characters introduced, or, rather, the characters serve as abstractions to represent certain qualities and passions of mankind ”

“ There is the story of one’s hero, and then, thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one’s story itself. I blush to confess it, but if one’s a dramatist one’s a dramatist, and the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as really the more objective of the two. ”

“ The plot, although not an involved one, hides enough mystery to lend the spice of the unknown to the reader's zest, and the simple and natural dénouement emphasizes the high moral ethics of the story, and throws into strong relief the deep human sentiments that dominate the tale. ”

“ But time and familiarity gradually wore off all the imagined things, and, as with all heroes when seen within touching distance and without the glass of romance, he was found to be about as full of human nature as the rest of us. ”

“ Now in character-studies the pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage, suffering or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator. ”

“ The strength of a story consists in the eloquence, vividness, and sincerity with which a given problem in human life or character is presented. Human nature is made up of all sorts of traits—selfishness, cupidity, self-sacrifice, courage, loyalty. All life is made up ... ”

“ Not a novel my son, at your age and with your temperament, it would arouse emotions in you if you created them in your characters, you are better without them.—No!—Something serious; Altruism as well as another, by all means! ”

“ This is obviously true in the case of the strict story of plot, and it is very curiously true in the case of the story of character or of atmosphere. For in the story which lays emphasis on personality, the evolution or degeneration of the particular trait which has been selected for presentation is the real story-element of the fiction. The fact is the root of the necessity that the action develop in concert with the trait of character, giving it opportunity for expression. ”

“ We see his shadow falling over the path of another person or feel his presence like a breath of wind. Perhaps we hear no more of him at the time, but in another book we meet him again, and now he is the hero, whom we follow until we think we know him like a dog-eared schoolbook—until some sudden turn upsets our theories, and we leave him in the last chapter with a baffled sense of imperfect understanding. ”

“ In the course of the story, the chief clue of which is love, woven in with intrigue, ambition, wealth, poverty, and other threads of human life, there occur no fewer than over four hundred characters, each one possessed of a distinctive personality drawn with marvellous skill. ”

“ What are our lives, our little lives in comparison? We, who each consider ourselves the one person upon the earth, the hero or heroine in the great drama: all the rest mere by-characters. We do not care to be considered of such little consequence ”

“ This power of life will enable the story-teller to enter, at the same time, into the life of the story she tells, and the life of those listening, to see the gift of the one and the need of the other. ”

“ The story is a fair and legitimate study of opposite temperaments. It is intensely realistic, and the difficult problem, which is by no means rare in real life, has been handled with dignity and with such restraint as not to offend. ”

“ And there are many more who, with a natural and almost pardonable desire to appear as the hero, or at least the raconteur, of a good story, or from the mere love of the marvellous, allow themselves to exaggerate the coincidences, adjust the dates, elaborate the details, or otherwise improve the too bare facts of an actual experience. ”

“ I think that the highest merit which a novel can have consists in perfect delineation of character, rather than in plot, or humour, or pathos, and I shall before long mention a subsequent work in which I think the main character of the story is so well developed as to justify me in asserting its claim above the others. ”

“ We recognize the relative insignificance of the individual drama, but its reality holds us. Its characters may be few, its scenery bare, its action trite and simple to other eyes, yet each of us, as the leading actor, finds in the development of a human soul a part which fascinates him, and lends itself to the finest shades of expression. ”

“ Their might has, for the most part, been the might of goodness. The chief mark that Paul and Wesley and Wilberforce, and all the great have carried about in the body has been the mark of character. What beauty is to the statue; what ripeness is to the fruit; what strength is to the body; what wisdom is to the reason—that character is to the soul! ”

“ Character is as well delineated as scenery. Dark and light shades—gay and corrupt life—vanity, vice and virtue, all perform their appropriate parts, in making up a goodly number of men and women, who once fairly introduced, carry themselves very naturally through plot and counter plot, to the close of a story which aptly illustrates the elements composing American society, in its various phases. ”

“ The narrative of an experience in which that same virtue finds concrete embodiment fires him with the desire to try the same conduct for himself. Few children fail to make the immediate connection between the hero or heroine of the story and themselves. ”

“ They put themselves behind and within their characters, and so make us feel that every act of their personages is not only natural but even—given the conditions— inevitable. We recognise that their story is the sole logical outcome of the interaction of their dramatis personæ. ”

“ Illustrated.
"The narrative is pervaded by a fine poetical spirit that is alive to the subtle graces of character, as well as to the tender influences of natural scenes. . . . Its chief merits must be placed in its graphic and expressive portraitures of character, its tenderness and delicacy of sentiment, its touches of heartfelt pathos, and the admirable wisdom and soundness of its ethical suggestions."—N. Y. Tribune. ”

“ What interests us in Requisites
of character. a man or woman in real life, or in the impressions we form of historical personages, is that which seems to us to give them individuality. A dramatic character must therefore, whatever its part in the action, be sufficiently marked by features of its own to interest the imagination; with these features its subsequent conduct must be consistent, and to them its participation in the action must correspond. ”

“ When life is adventurous and full of colour and crowded with striking incident, when, against a romantic background, there is the assertion of vigorous personality, resulting in novel turns of action, and exciting combinations of circumstance ”

“ With this great requisite of imaginative sympathy that sees value in all human beings, then, we set out on our chief task, to find the life-problem of our particular hero. This necessitates definition and analysis. Somehow we must find the sphere in which our hero moved, the group to which he belonged, and must then discover the qualities that he showed in the group which made him a real individual. Such definition and analysis will appear when we examine the character of the hero and the events in his life. ”

“ He requires each of the characters in his story to be personated by a living individual; that this individual should, in sex, age, and figure, meet as near as may be the prevalent conceptions of his fictitious original, nay, assume his entire personality; that every speech should be delivered in a suitable tone of voice, and accompanied by appropriate action and gesture ”

“ Be concrete in comparisons about size, shape, color, garb, and the like. Though you select your hero with care, you need make no fine distinctions of character, since broad strokes will be most effective. Endow your personages, both the hero and his enemy, with a few mannerisms and let them display these often. Get quickly into the action of the story and keep things lively to the end. ”

“ Personality is the most prominent element of the story of character, and the events are the most prominent element of the story of complication; each story stresses one of the twin elements of drama, the persons and their acts ”