The Art of Reading People: Character, Expression, Interpretation

Rationale

In ninth and tenth grades, respectively, English Literature & Composition students are required to read Romeo and Juliet ⁴ and Julius Caesar ⁵ in addition to parallel texts with similar themes told from different viewpoints. The Help ⁶ has been selected as a companion parallel text to these tragedies because the main characters transform during the story as Juliet, Romeo, and Marcus Brutus do. Moreover, the author, Kathryn Stockett's, approach to revealing character is punctuated with stock characters, foils, and villains just as are Shakespeare's tragedies.

To help students analyze characters and write effective character analyses it is necessary to expand their thinking beyond the character web (a graphic organizer) that asks what the character looks like, dresses like, and says, and how other characters respond to the main character. Secondary students often rely on this limited structure to analyze a character because it was taught in elementary school as an introduction to character. Although many students understand what a character is, many do not understand the technique of characterization or how to recognize its various stances employed in writing.

Students will need to learn to incorporate characterization strategies into their writing. Characterization is the use of literary techniques to create a character. Authorial techniques to create characters include: first-person, narrative voice as seen, for example, in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time ⁷ and in parts of Walter Dean Myers' Monster, ⁸; third-person portrayal of a character's behavior by a narrator, as in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books or Jane Austen's novels; and representations of a character's internal states as seen in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart ⁹ and The Cask of Amontillado. ^{1 0} Each of these authors has used characterization superbly to reveal characters to the reader in a thought-provoking manner. It is important that students be able to distinguish between these three stances although they may overlap in some texts:

-When using direct description, the writer through a speaker, a narrator, or another character simply comments on the character, telling the reader about such matters as the character's appearance, habits, dress, background, personality, and motivations.

-In portrayal of a character's behavior, the writer presents the actions and speech of the character, allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions from what the character says or does.

-When using representations of internal states, the writer reveals directly the character's private thoughts and emotions, often by an internal monologue, soliloquy, an aside, or the use of first-person narration.

Another impediment to expanding students' thinking about character is their own self-concept. Poet Nikki Giovanni once wrote, "if you don't understand yourself, you don't understand anybody else." Thus comes the dilemma faced when students are asked to analyze characters they frequently encounter in novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. Since adolescents have not lived long enough to understand who they are, they struggle with interpreting who someone else is, too. In fact, many students are often baffled when asked to explain a character's motivation, mindset, and personality in connection to theme and plot. Since these are intangible and complex character traits that are seldom explicitly stated by the author, students have to be taught strategies and methods for identifying and interpreting a character's transformation, evolution, and growth. To cue students in to recognizing well-developed, dynamic characters, it is essential that they acquire language (positive/negative) to describe characters and hear the character's intonations while reading. Secondly, a connection must be established that relates what is happening in the text to students' perceptions and subconscious knowledge of the world. Finally, students must be diligent to avoid making assumptions when confronted with familiar narratives and narrative structures. For example, many students have experienced a teen romance sometime during, high school and while reading Romeo and Juliet, they may be tempted to dismiss Romeo's declarations of love as mere infatuation based on their own experiences. Of course, this blind spot may cause them to miss that Romeo has changed by the end of the play as a result of being married to Juliet.