Let me begin with a few theoretical presuppositions. The first one is a restatement of Chatman's position that “a viable theory of character should preserve openness and treat characters as autonomous beings, not as mere plot functions.”¹ Considering the illusionary power of literary characters, it may seem unnecessary to say this, but in most structuralist narratology ‘character’ has been unduly reduced to mere attributes connected with a plot,² to ‘actants,’³ to a stable link between a plot function and predicates,⁴ or to an ‘agent’ in the plot line.⁵

The second presupposition is that fictional characters are imaginary constructs residing in the mind of the reader. This means that they are psychic phenomena formed by the reader in analogy to real-life characters, with the difference that their creation is not based on the open context of our experience of life but on the distinct and restricted information derived from the reading of one particular fictional text. This implies that the same categories for subsuming masses of detail (such as type, stereotype, individual, character trait, habit, mood, action, thinking, feeling) are active in the creation of fictional characters as in our perception of real-life characters. What is also active in both is the whole range of analytic categories (such as character development versus stable core, or consciousness versus the unconscious) and of evaluative categories (such as right or wrong, good or bad, innocent or guilty). The analogy further implies that with any one reader the same idiosyncratic model of character formation—referred to by psychologists as the ‘implied theory of personality’ (“implizite Persönlichkeitstheorie”⁶)—is the basis for both real-life and fictional characters.

The third presupposition is that the specific condition under which the illusion of fictional characters is formed allows for a more rigid analysis of character formation, character analysis and evaluation than is the case with real-life characters. The reason is that the quantity and quality of information motivating and guiding the creation of the mental entity known as a ‘fictional character’ is strictly limited by the specific literary text, and that the particular selection of information provided or withheld, as well as its sequence and possible recurrence, makes it possible to observe more closely the strategies of constructing, analysing and evaluating characters.

That the selection of information pertaining to the formation of character is all-important hardly needs any further comment. One might just mention here that in fiction the information giving process is far less restricted than in life: whereas we can know about other people's feelings or thoughts only by means of inference from their words and deeds, to the omniscient narrator and his audience any character is, indeed, an open book.

The significance of the particular sequence of information for the building of fictional characters is much less obvious and has so far received more attention from psychologists than from narratologists. In an earlier paper on this particular matter,⁷ I tried to show why the psychological investigation of “impression formation”⁸ and the “primacy effect”⁹ is of particular importance for the study of literary characters. Although information pertaining to a particular character is only received successively during the process of reading, we very early on create an illusion, on very scanty evidence, of a fairly complete person and work from this assumption while taking in further information. While we are reading, we are under the mistaken impression that the characters are already there and that we are simply getting to know more and more about them, whereas we are really just imagining them under the guidance of the text we are reading. And the same illusion makes us believe that we may analyse them, may get beneath the surface of their appearance, while in fact we are creating this depth from the sequence of the analytic or evaluative comments we are gradually taking in.

That finally recurrence deserves our special attention derives from the fact that recurrent information confirms earlier “impression formation” and is the basis for the illusion of stable character traits. Again there is a close analogy with the formation of our notion of real-life characters, at least if we are ready to share Jacques Lacan's view that the individuality and unity of any person consists in his or her “automatisme de répétition”¹⁰ (Freud's “Wiederholungszwang”). Thus we have good reason to look closely at what an author has a fictional character repeatedly do or say (or not do and keep silent about).

As fictional characters are powerful illusions which capture the attention of the reader of fiction, close observation of the strategies of character construction, character analysis, and character evaluation may indeed reveal a great deal of the peculiarity and attractiveness of particular narratives as well as the particular style of their authors. I would like to demonstrate this by looking at the character portrayal in three short stories by Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant.

The text of Margaret Laurence's story “To Set Our House in Order” motivates the reader to imagine no fewer than nine characters, though in varying degrees. As to the quantity of information, Grandmother MacLeod and the first-person narrator Vanessa stand out clearly as the main characters, whereas others like Vanessa's baby brother, her dead uncle Roderick or the physician Dr Cates are only mentioned a few times and seem to consist of not much more than a name. But quantity of information alone is not a reliable measure of importance. It is true, of course, that Vanessa is all-important because as the narrator she is ever present: all information about the other characters is filtered through her consciousness. On the other hand, scarcity of information and physical absence do not necessarily signify diminished importance. As the story unfolds, it is the yet unborn baby that first compels the narrator's and the reader's attention, and it soon becomes clear that the whole story is delimited by the coming into the world of the narrator's baby brother. Even the very first sentence indicates that the “order” topicalized in the title of the story is disturbed by the baby even before its birth (“When the baby was almost ready to be born, something went wrong”¹¹), and even when it is still absent it keeps the other characters constantly fearing that even more may go wrong, that the child and its mother may die. The mother, too, is mainly absent, and information about her is very scanty; but, again, she becomes all-important through the constant fear of the narrator and the other characters around her that she may die, that her temporary absence from home caused by the birth of the baby may become a permanent one.

As to the selection of information, the only inside view of a character we receive is that of the narrator-agent Vanessa, and this view is limited throughout to the scope of a ten-year-old girl's experience of the events as they are remembered and told by the narrating “I.” This view includes the evaluation of all the other characters. However, the last sentence of the story (“I felt that whatever God might love in this world, it was certainly not order,” p. 257), in conjunction with the title, which is taken from Grandmother MacLeod's maxim “God loves Order—he wants each one of us to set our house in order” (p. 248), makes it clear that the narrator has selected all the information—including that on the characters—to prove a point.

This is also the reason why Grandmother MacLeod is the figure that looms largest in the story. She, “steel-spined despite her apparent fragility” (p. 244), and someone who “did not believe in the existence of fear, or if she did, she never let on” (p. 245), she is clearly the antagonist of the fear-driven Vanessa and the other characters around her. Not able or willing to take note of the deteriorating situation during the Depression, or of the worries of a child fearing for her mother's life and those of a husband fearing for his wife's, she continues dressing and acting as a lady, refusing to help but insisting that the house be kept immaculate. She has nothing more important on her mind than selecting “two dozen lace-bordered handkerchiefs of pure Irish linen” (p. 250) from a Robinson & Cleaver catalogue while her daughter-in-law is about to have a Caesarean. If despite this she does not appear a total monster, it is owing to some additional information indicating that her hungry allegiance to the unchanging rigidity of material order—including the fixed principles of her dead father—constitutes a defense mechanism, a strategy to escape the threat of chaos and avoid the painful feeling of loss, whose intensity might kill her. When she bullies her son Ewen to name his new-born baby after her dead son Roderick, Vanessa remembers what she told her before: “When your Uncle Roderick got killed, I thought I would die. But I didn't die” (p. 254).

A repetition of this kind brings up the question of recurrence and its functions. Recurrence in this story is used throughout to lend identity to otherwise not fully developed characters. The mother repeatedly appears as weak and timid, the father constantly tries to hide his fear from Vanessa and gives in to the tyranny of Grandmother MacLeod, whereas her aunt Edna keeps ironising the tyrant's aristocratic pretensions.

Sequentiality of information is—except in the case of the narrator—not used for creating an impression of change in character but only for purposes of plot function and the addition of information. The baby that causes all the disturbance and fear is mentioned at the beginning and then again towards the end of the story, hardly ever in between. The same holds true for the mother. Their roles are dictated by plot alone, as is the case with Dr Cates, who is mentioned very briefly only twice. Sequentiality of information in the case of Grandmother MacLeod means only the addition of more of the same, with the effect that she appears as someone incapable of change. Sequentiality suggests change, however, in the case of Vanessa, whose initially quite specific fear of the loss of her mother has developed towards the end into an all-encompassing existential insecurity, a feeling that order cannot be the principle of a world in which so much may go wrong. The reason is that it is not until then that Vanessa and the reader learn how much more has already gone wrong than just the baby's fetal position: that her kind father as a boy not only damaged his brother Roderick's eye with an air rifle, but also gave up his youthful wish to go into the merchant marine and see the world when he decided to become a doctor after Roderick's early death in the Great War; that the imposing exterior of Grandfather MacLeod conceals a tragedy, for it turns out that the successful doctor would much rather have been a classical scholar; that the soldier's death of Uncle Roderick was not at all as heroic as her father's merciful lie made Grandmother MacLeod believe; and that Grandmother MacLeod betrays her hidden insecurity as soon as the name of her son Roderick is mentioned. All this is clearly put in to strengthen Vanessa's growing conviction “that whatever God might love in this world, it was certainly not order” (p. 257).

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Alice Munro's story “Who Do You Think You Are?” is in some ways similar to Margaret Laurence's “To Set Our House in Order”: This story, too, is a story largely consisting of childhood memories. As with Vanessa in Laurence's story, the fact that Rose is the central character is not founded so much on sheer quantity of information as on perspective—we actually hear more about the “village idiot” Milton Homer. “Who Do You Think You Are?” is a third-person narrative, the perspective is limited to the recalling, analysing and evaluating mind of Rose, who thus acts as a ‘reflector’ and a third-person centre of consciousness. This implies that all information about the other six characters mentioned in the story is filtered through her mind, and the selection of information is an indication of her predilections.

This selection is clearly biased in favour of one character, Milton Homer, and to a lesser degree it favours the characters directly connected with him: his imitator Ralph Gillespie and the aunts who take care of him, Hattie and Mattie Homer. Brian, who at the beginning of the story gives the motivation for Rose's recollections (“There were some things Rose and her brother Brian could safely talk about, without running aground on principles or statements of position, and one of them was Milton Homer”¹²), seems soon to be forgotten. In fact, Rose is so much carried away by her imitation of Milton Homer that at one point in the story Brian laughingly says “Now that's enough,” and his wife Phoebe tries to stop her before she rouses Brian's impatience. But these interruptions are of no avail; Rose goes on and on with her stories of Milton Homer and the people associated with him.

There must therefore be strong reasons for her obsessive selection, and we find them when we consider the quality and recurrence of the information selected. What accounts for Milton Homer's deviant, partly funny, partly outrageous and indecent behaviour, which is the object of Rose's roaming memory, is less a lack of intelligence than a total lack of any restraint:

What was missing was a sense of precaution, Rose thought now. Social inhibition, though there was no such name for it at that time. Whatever it is that ordinary people lose when they are drunk, Milton Homer never had, or might have chosen not to have—and this is what interests Rose—at some early point in life.

(p. 303)

It becomes clear that Milton Homer pays for this freedom from any social or moral restraint by being ostracized: he may run around the yards, but the doors of the houses remain closed to him. Later, when we hear that Rose is having an affair with a married man, we get an inkling of why she is interested in the possibility that Milton Homer's behaviour may nevertheless have been the result of a deliberate choice, and we also begin to understand why she does not want to discuss principles with her brother.

But there are other reasons for her obsessively selective memory. One is decidedly her craze for imitation. First we hear that Rose, in her brother's living room, revels in imitating Milton Homer (p. 300), and when asked how she can remember him so well she answers “‘I didn't see him do it. What I saw was Ralph Gillespie doing Milton Homer’” (p. 301). A little later she points out that Milton Homer himself “was a mimic of ferocious gifts and terrible energy” (p. 302), and further towards the end of the story we learn that Ralph Gillespie had become obsessed with imitation: “Ralph don't know when to stop. He Milton Homer'd himself right out of a job” (p. 312). It is no wonder that Rose, who also does not know when to stop imitating, and very likely for that reason has become an actress, “felt his life, close, closer than the lives of men she'd loved, one slot over from her own” (p. 316).

This remark is the conclusion of the story, and while pointing out Rose's shift of concentration from Milton Homer to Ralph Gillespie and back to herself, we have touched on the question of sequence. In Alice Munro's story memory covers a much greater time span, and thus sequentiality of information can be used more easily to convey changes in the characters. We learn, for instance, that Milton Homer has become quieter with age, that Flo used to change her social contacts at an increasing rate before Rose finally had to take her to the County Home, that Ralph Gillespie never fully recovered from an accident in the navy and finally died. But these changes remain ephemeral in comparison to the change that memory brings about in Rose. First she reverts to the theme of Milton Homer only in order to avoid a clash of principles when talking with her brother Brian. Then this theme gains a striking autonomy, bringing Rose to realize her own interest in the possibility of deliberate social estrangement as a means of achieving freedom from social inhibition. Moving on to Milton Homer's aunts Hattie and Mattie, who with their Methodist morality embody the social inhibition he so totally lacks, Rose remembers that it was Hattie who asked her the disturbing question “Who do you think you are?”, a question intended at the time merely as a reproach for thinking that she was “better than other people just because you can learn poems” (p. 306), but now revealing its much broader existential significance. As it was in Hattie's English class that Ralph Gillespie made Rose notice the literary implications of Milton Homer's name, her attention then becomes focussed on him as the “boy who specialized in Milton Homer imitations” (p. 308). The recollection of her last encounter with him leads Rose back to her present situation, including an unsatisfactory love affair, and her urge to conceal her intimate feelings from Brian and Phoebe. Thus the whole sequence of information on various characters is above all designed to effect a heightened self-knowledge in Rose, enabling her to find in the final recognition of her closeness to Ralph at least an approximate answer to the central question “Who do you think you are?”.

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As against the similarities of character portrayal in the two stories considered so far, the strategies of creating and dissecting character in Mavis Gallant's “Acceptance of Their Ways” look remarkably different. The story portrays an after-dinner conversation between three English women in a boarding house on the Italian Riviera, with the leave-taking of one of them the following morning as a coda. To this extent, there is a similarity to Alice Munro's story, which is delimited by Rose's talk in her brother Brian's living room. But a significant difference, if not the decisive one, lies in the choice of perspective. Whereas in Laurence's and Munro's stories characterisation is consistently filtered through the restricted consciousness of a narrator-agent or a reflector, in “Acceptance of Their Ways” we have both a ‘reflector’ in one of the three women, Lily Littel, and, in addition to this, an omniscient narrator. And it is this combination that is largely responsible for the continuous and ruthless dissecting of character which is the most prominent feature of this story.

As to the selection of information, there are only three characters and information is distributed much more evenly than in the stories previously discussed. Although we learn most about Lily Littel due to her additional role as a reflector, there is no really minor character. The quantity of information on each character is, in fact, quite remarkable; the story consists almost purely of character portrayal. Also remarkable is the quality of information. For all three characters it ranges from outward appearance, manners, and verbal expression to private thoughts, basic values, and deep convictions, from recognisable moods to the most hidden fears and desires. The result is a rare transparency of character, brought about for the two other women by Lily Littel's acute observations and ruthless analyses, and for Lily by an omniscient narrator who is just as merciless and devastatingly ironic.

The three characters we are thus induced to imagine are two ‘gentlewomen,’ the hostess Mrs Freeport and her old friend Mrs Garnett, and Lily Littel, a social climber who tries very hard to become like them and is therefore ready to accept their ways however odd they may seem to be. Though paired in that way, Mrs Freeport and Mrs Garnett are conceived as differently as two characters can be, the former domineering to the point of being sadistic, the latter rather submissive, but capricious. Both are also sentimental, which Lily, who can be both submissive and vengeful at the same time, is decidedly not.

These basic character traits are revealed through recurrent verbal and nonverbal behaviour as well as, in the case of Lily, through information directly presented by the omniscient narrator. The most obvious use of recurrence is, however, the repeated pointing out of the amazing contradictions within each character, especially in Lily Littel, contradictions that often border on, and sometimes attain, the quality of paradox. Much of this contradictory behaviour could be classified as ‘hypocrisy,’ a form of behaviour traditionally attributed to the English upper classes, and there is ample evidence that the narrator uses Lily Littel's endeavours to emulate just this quality as a scathingly satirical device.

Mrs Freeport, who unsuccessfully runs a boarding-house, is so poor that she cannot even afford decent food for her guests and herself, but she keeps displaying her superiority and treats a paying guest like Lily like a servant. Always wanting to be in command, she turns out to be utterly dependent on those she tries to subject, alternatively insulting them and craving their friendship.

Mrs Garnett, an elderly widow of moderate financial and intellectual means, still likes to see herself as “the victim of the effects of her worrying beauty—a torment to shoe clerks and bus conductors,”¹³ as the sentence, taking a decidedly ironic turn, continues. Considering herself to be badly treated by her friend Vanessa Freeport, she has nevertheless been coming back again and again for years, and though she speaks in a soft martyred tone of voice, she is vengeful enough to first persuade Mrs Freeport to prepare an Italian farewell dinner and then not to touch it at all.

But Lily Littel, though seemingly their disciple, in fact surpasses her models by far in her deliberately double-faced stance. She only stays on the Italian side of the border because she unfortunately cannot afford “the coarse and grubby gaiety of the French Riviera” (p. 203). She puts up with Mrs Freeport's condescending manner because she craves respectability and can punish her hostess from time to time by allegedly visiting her sister but in fact resorting to a hotel in Nice, where she ritually takes to the bottle. Ruthless in her desire to get on in the world, she is ready to suppress her true self, which is allowed to emerge only when she is drunk. “If Lily had settled for this bleached existence, it was explained by a sentence scrawled over a page of her locked diary: ‘I live with gentlewomen now’” (pp. 205f.).

There is no evidence of change in any of the three double-faced characters. The sequence of information in this story simply involves the addition of more and more weaknesses of a similar kind and therefore rules out even the possibility of change. As is usually the case with satirical writing, the characters seem to be created only in order to be viciously dissected. Mavis Gallant's scalpel continuously touches to the quick. Watch it touching Lily Littel: “An excellent cook, she had dreamed of being a poisoner, but decided to leave that for the loonies; it was no real way to get on” (p. 205). In comparison the strategies of character portrayal in Laurence's and Munro's stories appear rather tame and benevolent.

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A comparison of character portrayal in the three stories makes evident that the narrative perspective strongly influences the range and quality of information. With a narrator-agent as in Laurence's story or a third-person centre of consciousness as in Munro's, inside views are necessarily restricted to the character of the narrator, whereas in Gallant's story they are deliberately limited to the character of Lily. Conversely, outside views are more or less restricted to the other characters in the first two stories and easily provided for all three in “Acceptance of Their Ways.” But it is the very effective combination of the two that marks the increased potential of the omniscient narrator in that story. Looking at Lily and inside her, this narrator can say about Lily: “Her eyes, which were a washy blue, were tolerably kind when she was plotting mischief” (pp. 203f.).

As to the selection of information, it becomes obvious that with a larger number of characters in a short story we get a hierarchy of plenitude. Irrespective of the total number of characters, attention would appear to be focussed on not more than two or three: in Laurence's story on Grandmother MacLeod and Vanessa, in Munro's on Milton Homer, Ralph Gillespie and Rose, in Gallant's on all three women.

A comparison also shows that recurrence can be put to various uses. With Laurence it serves to give identity to the less fully developed characters; with Munro it emphasizes those traits in the fuller characters, Milton Homer and Ralph Gillespie, that are significant for Rose's self-knowledge; with Gallant it substantiates the profiles of the three characters, their differences and the mutual hypocrisy that is being satirized.

As far as the use of sequentiality is concerned, there is also some variety. In “To Set Our House in Order” it produces the impression of both change of character and unwillingness to change; in “Who Do You Think You Are?” it mainly indicates a change in self-awareness; and in “Acceptance of Their Ways” it brings out the impossibility of change and the narrator's preference for dissecting.

Character evaluation is largely implied in the strategies already mentioned, but something remains to be pointed out. In Laurence's and Munro's stories evaluation is linked to the narrator-agent and the reflector respectively; if evaluations of other characters are presented, these are re-evaluated by the narrator-agent and reflector. In Gallant's story the impression is created that it is mainly Lily who evaluates the two other women, their mutual evaluating included, but Lily herself is, as we have seen, continually at the mercy of the omniscient narrator's evaluating faculty. And evaluating is what this narrator likes to do—as does Lily.

Notes

1. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca/London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), p. 119.

2. Claude Bremond, Logique de récit, Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

3. A. J. Greimas, Sémantique structurale: recherche de méthode, Langue et langage (Paris: Larousse, 1966).

4. Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de la prose (rev. ed., Paris: Seuil, 1973).

5. Teun A. van Dijk, “Philosophy of Action and Theory of Narrative,” Poetics, 5 (1976), 287-338 (paper issued from a seminar held at the University of Amsterdam in 1974).

6. Cf. Jürgen Jahnke, Interpersonale Wahrnehmung (Stuttgart etc.: Kohlhammer, 1975).

7. Herbert Grabes, “Wie aus Sätzen Personen werden … : Über die Erforschung literarischer Figuren,” Poetica, 10 (1978), 405-28.

8. Cf. S. E. Ash, “Forming Impressions of Personality,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41 (1946), 258-90; Abraham S. Luchins, “Forming Impressions of Personality: A Critique,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 43 (1948), 318-25; Erving Goffman, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” in Stephan P. Spitzer (ed.), The Sociology of Personality: An Enduring Problem in Psychology (New York etc.: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969), pp. 94-108.

9. Cf. Norman H. Anderson/Alfred A. Barrios, “Primacy Effects in Personality Impression Formation,” in Clyde Hendrick/Russell A. Jones (eds.), The Nature of Theory and Research in Social Psychology (New York/London: Academic Press, 1972), pp. 210-18.

10. Cf. “Le seminaire sur ‘La Lettre volée’” in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 11-61, here p. 11.

11. “To Set Our House in Order,” in Wayne Grady (ed.), The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (Markham, Ontario, etc.: Penguin, 1980), pp. 243-57, here p. 243; page numbers in the text refer to this edition.

12. “Who Do You Think You Are?”, in Wayne Grady (ed.), The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, pp. 299-316, here p. 299; page numbers in the text refer to this edition.

13. “Acceptance of Their Ways,” in Alec Lucas (ed.), Great Canadian Short Stories (New York: Dell, 1971), pp. 203-11, here p. 205; page numbers in the text refer to this edition.