However, in many complicated aspects of novel art, characters are perhaps the most difficult to discuss in technical terms, because novels contain too many different types of characters, and there are countless ways to express them: there are main characters and secondary characters; Having a flat or round figure; There are people who describe their hearts, such as Mrs. Dalloway of Virginia Woolf; Others observe from the outside according to other people's perspectives, such as Sally Bowles of Christopher isherwood.
The easiest way to introduce a character is to describe his appearance and make a summary of his life. In George Eliot's book Middlemarch, the introduction of dorothea Brooke is the ultimate expression of this method:
Miss Brooke's plain clothes highlight her beauty. Her hands and wrists are so delicate that even if the sleeves of the clothes she wears have no style, she always looks as dignified and elegant as the Virgin in the eyes of Italian painters. Although her dress style is unpretentious, it sets off her silhouette, height and grace, giving people an impression of classical elegance, as if reading quotations from Bible passages or excerpts from classic poems in newspapers. People say she is clever, but they will add that her sister Celia knows more common sense.
A narrative like this lasted for several pages. This method is good, but it is more suitable for a slow-paced culture and not suitable for our current cultural tastes. Modern novelists usually tend to let the details of characters emerge slowly through changeable behaviors and words. In any case, all narratives in the novel are selective; The basic figure of speech needed is metonymy, which refers to the whole with parts. -Excerpted from The Art of Fiction-(English) David Lodge
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