Minor characters

minor characters

Sometimes, developing characters are scarcely individuals at all; they supply background and give atmosphere. As such, they are not carefully drawn: some may be merely mentioned; others may be distinguished slightly. Extra characters are used sometimes merely to carry out details. A narrator who is not a participant in the action is sometimes needed. It is useless and impossible to enumerate all the ways in which accessory characters may serve. Each story has its own needs. A character may be added for the sake of naturalness. When there is something apparently mysterious in the story, a person may be used to confirm the strangeness, to make it actual. In They, again, Madden, the butler, serves exactly such a purpose. Up to the point where he enters there has been no reason to suspect that the children are not real children. They have seemed excessively shy, they have never been named, but neither has the blind woman nor

the man from the other side of the county. Now, by questions, the butler shows surprise that the man from the other side of the county should have seen the children. Had he seen them even before the blind woman had spoken to him? Evidently they are visible to some and invisible to others. The atmosphere of mystery is deepened by being made

. pire definite.

In The Revolt of Mother, there appear several minor characters. Chief among these are the daughter who sits embroidering and the young son who lopes off to school. Both of these characters are necessary to the proper development of the story. Because she wishes her daughter to have a parlor, not a kitchen in which to be married, and because Nancy and George Eastman are to stay at the Penns' after the marriage, Sarah Penn feels especially anxious for the fulfillment of the promise of a new house. Without such justification, her revolt would have been inexcusable; it would have revealed a self-. willed, obstinate, and disloyal wife. That she has really been an ever-faithful wife is emphasized, however, throughout the story in many little ways. How eager she is — even after forty years — to bake Adoniram's favorite pies! The boy is of less real service. He is needed chiefly to assist in the moving. There would have been much impropriety in calling in the neighbors to assist. They would have been under no obligations to obey the wife, and they would never have run the risk of angering the husband. This is strictly a family affair. The boy must obey

his mother. To him, also, explanations which could never be made to neighbors, could be given. The minister is another minor personage. He comes tn, talk the matter over. Evidently he wishes to convince the wife that she has been undutiful. He goes away dismayed. In the story he serves merely to show that the wife is resolute, that her purpose has not changed. She feels that she has nothing to be ashamed of. She is unabashed. But for the minister, we should have wondered just a little whether the wife would be steadfast in her purpose and hold her ground on the arrival of her husband. The other personages are scarcely more than mentioned: the hired man, the haymakers, the men and women of the community. They represent nothing in the story, except a background of farm toil and neighborhood gossip. A story is constructed rationally, and the developing characters are simply the outgrowth of its needs.

Keep minor or short story characters simple

Keep minor or short story characters simple

Eliminate every trait and deed which does not help peculiarly to make the character's part in the particular story either intelligible or more open to such sympathy as it merits.

This rule of dramatic economy is a result of the peculiar structural limitations of the short story, and, marks the latter off most sharply from the novel. Unlike the novelist, the story-teller makes no attempt to give us a panorama of life, in all its perplexing intricacy and fulness. His is the humbler aim, to render someone little scene perfectly. He does not hang together all his impressions, conjectures, and wishes about the world, weld them into a huge Weltanschauung, and project them into language in the form of a story about an imaginary society, as Balzac did. To attempt this through the short story would be as foolish as to try telling the history of the United States in one sentence.

The ultimate reason for the rule is that the short story has no words to spare for nonessentials, and the only essentials in its character drawing are intelligibility and sympathetic portrayal of the one trait which figures dramatically in it.