When you open a new book without previous knowledge of what the book is about, you are allowing yourself to be completely receptive to the ideas that book will convey. There are no preconceptions about the plot, message, and most importantly, the characters. I believe beginning a work without assumptions is the best way to discover what makes a character unique. This leads to the question, what is unique? According to Webster's dictionary, to be unique is to be unlike anything or anyone else. If we were to take that definition literally, every character is unique because no two people are alike. Therefore, the creation of any character automatically makes them unlike any other character. No character was created by the same author, at the same time, set in the same place, and with the same features. For a character to be unoriginal, every aspect of that character needs to align with another character, from creation to interpretation.
However, if readers took everything that literally, where would the art and fascination of literature go? A character becomes unique, in my opinion, when they have an uncommon trait, be it physical, mental, emotional, or even spiritual. Without an uncommon feature, the character would be just like anyone else. This begs the question, who am I to say that a trait is uncommon? What is different to me may be common for another reader. For example, in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged the character Dagny is remarkable because she is humbly intelligent and surrounds herself with people who hold themselves to a very high standard, no matter how fiscally successful they may be. She is unique to me because her intelligence and choice of companionship was uncommon. Another example of a character I consider unique is Lord Walder Fray from Game of Thrones. Why? Because he murdered a King, his pregnant wife, his mother, and their soldiers at a banquet that was held to celebrate the marriage of Walder Fray's daughter to the King's right hand man. He was unique because he double crossed his ally in an uncommon way. For other readers, an intelligent woman and a back-stabbing lord may not be remarkable, but because I find them uncommon, they are unique to me.
It's a bit of a cop out to say that there is not, nor will there ever be a character that everyone can agree to be unique. But I'm saying it because, as I have come to conclude, when you read literature, you bring your experiences and biases to the piece. Therefore, every character we encounter is unique to our interpretation. Dagny may be a capitalistic control freak and Lord Walder Fray may be a opportunistic mastermind to others. Or they may not be significant at all. What makes a character unique isn't how the character is portrayed. What makes a character unique is how we as readers perceive that character, for it is from our own personal perception that we form a unique character.
ReplyDeleteLauren, I agree with your take on unique characters. I think the concept of a person, piece of work, or an object being “unique” is a completely subjective matter. The true definition of unique, like you said, is a little hard to obtain. So when we look at unique characters, we tend to gravitate toward literary characters with unconventional tastes, mannerisms, or ideals. However, while the idea of a character being unique is different depending on who you ask, characters can fall outside of a social expectation that a majority holds. In other words, large demographics can collectively look at something as out of the ordinary, or unique. This concept can be applied to Western literature, as we have social expectations for people to meet up with, and the second they don’t, it’s unique. For example, it can be generally agreed upon that Gregor Samsa being a bug for most of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is unique and unconventional of a protagonist. So while the standard of “unique” is subjective in many cases, large populations of readers can collectively deem a literary character as unique- which, to me, is part of what makes a piece of literature stand out from the rest.
3. I completely agree that the originality of a character comes with the author’s portrayal of the character as well as the reader’s interpretation. Any character, whether round or flat (as Foster would describe them), has special qualities that make them differ from any other character created. The personal connection between the reader and the protagonist of a text can deal heavily either with the depth of the character or even the smallest detail that describes them. Reading is the gateway to knowledge of all sorts, and sometimes, the connection between the character and the reader reveals more about life than any sort of informative text ever will be able to reveal.
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