What is the difference between "character" and "characterization" according to the paragraph below?

Character is essential to plot. Without characters Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes would be a travelogue through the jungle and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” little more than a faded history of a sleepy town in the South. If stories were depopulated, the plots would disappear because characters and plots are interrelated. A dangerous jungle is important only because we care what effect it has on a character. Characters are influenced by events just as events are shaped by characters. Tarzan’s physical strength is the result of his growing up in the jungle, and his strength, along with his inherited intelligence, allows him to be master there. The methods by which a writer creates people in a story so that they seem actually to exist are called characterization. Huck Finn never lived, yet those who have read Mark Twain’s novel about his adventures along the Mississippi River feel as if they know him. A good writer gives us the illusion that a character is real, but we should also remember that a character is not an actual person but instead has been created by the author. Though we might walk out of a room in which Huck Finn’s Pap talks racist nonsense, we would not throw away the book in a similar fit of anger. This illusion of reality is the magic that allows us to move beyond the circumstances of our own lives into a writer’s fictional world, where we can encounter everyone from royalty to paupers, murderers, lovers, cheaters, martyrs, artists, destroyers, and, nearly always, some part of ourselves. To understand our response to a story, we should be able to recognize the methods of characterization the author uses.

According to this writer, characters are the people, animals, or objects who inhabit the world an author has created and whose actions and experiences drive the plot forward. Characterization is the tool an author uses to bring those characters to life and make them more realistic and relatable for their readers.

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This paragraph outlines the importance of characters and characterization in fiction. According to this writer, characters are the driving force of plot. They are the physical people, animals, or animate objects that inhabit the world the author has created. It is characters' actions and experiences that define the story.

You can see the examples this writer gives of Tarzan of the Apes and "A Rose for Emily," whose characters drive the action of the story. Without the figure of Tarzan or Emily, we have nothing to care about in these stories.

However, to make us even more invested as a reader, the author may also employ characterization. This a device an author uses to bring the characters they have created to full life and allow us to believe the illusion of reality that they have woven for us. Characterization could be created through dialogue, description, or action. Is this character talkative, introspective, brash, vain, solemn, reserved, or particularly afraid of spiders? There are infinite ways writers can paint their characters, but characterization is the tool that turns flat, lifeless characters into fully realized human beings.

It is this, the above writer suggests, that allows us to fully connect with fiction. Characterization turns the characters into beings we can connect with and relate to and in whom we can recognize a part of ourselves. In this way, a writer's work is able to come alive in the reader, and the reader is able to immerse themselves entirely in the fictional illusion the writer has woven for them.

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According to this paragraph, a character is a person in a story whereas characterization is a device used to create a character and make him or her seem vivid and real.

A character is literally just a figure in a story whose actions drive the plot. A character need not be a person—it can be an animal or even an object. All that matters is that the character provides a reason for a plot to occur.

Characterization usually occurs through dialogue, action, and what the author tells us outright about a character. These elements make a character seem like a real person. This keeps the reader invested and interested in the story.

So according to this paragraph, character and characterization are quite interrelated. One cannot exist without the other. Characterization cannot exist without character, and a character lacking characterization is nothing but an emotionless puppet the reader will be unable to care about.

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The paragraph states that any person who appears in a story is a character. Without characters there would be no real story, the writer argues, because it is characters that make the plot of a story come alive. A character, however, doesn't have to have much of a role in a story nor does the character have to be very well rounded.

Characterization, on the other hand, is the process of making a character in a a story seem real. The author uses the example of Huckleberry Finn, a boy who might seem alive to us. A good writer like Mark Twain can create characters who seem like real people, but we need to remember that these figures are merely fictional constructs.

A story needs characters, whether they are one-dimensional or well-rounded. A good story, however, includes characters who are so well-characterized that they fell alive to us.

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Based on the included paragraph, it is a bit tough to specifically nail down the definition of "character" because the paragraph doesn't include a definition. The paragraph states that characters are "essential to plot" and "influenced by events," but that doesn't concretely tell readers what a character is. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a character as follows:

one of the persons of a drama or novel

That works okay, but I believe that the definition should be expanded a little bit. The above definition seems a bit too limited to me because it gives the connotation that a character must be human. I like to define a character as follows: a character is a person, an animal, or an imaginary being that participates in the action of a story.

Characterization is what makes a character feel real and alive. Characterization is the tool that authors use to make a character something more than a proper noun. The paragraph that the question provides ends with a statement about authors using various characterization methods to build a character.

The two methods of characterization are direct and indirect characterization. Direct characterization happens when the narrator or another character directly tells readers information about a character. This kind of characterization usually occurs early in a story. The narrator will tell readers that a particular character has blond hair and blue eyes. There isn't anything for a reader to deduce about the character. That's what indirect characterization requires. A reader or viewer must deduce the characteristics of a character based on that character's behavior, speech, appearance, etc.

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