Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

20.2 The typicality of characters and events
Unit 20 Narrative
Section 5 Narrative

The raw material of narrative consists of events with their accompanying actors and circumstances. These, we have suggested, comprise the basic content of a narrative, which becomes shaped into form by ordering and reordering their sequence and by the choice of point of view. However, one of the characteristics of narratives is that the events themselves are often stereotyped, with the genre of the narrative to some extent requiring certain kinds of typical event - a marriage, a murder, a chase, a disguise uncovered, a false accusation, etc. The very typicality of events moves them from the level of narrative content to the level of narrative form - they are among the components from which a narrative form is built. Hence, there is a conflict for events between the tendency towards typicality (a formal characteristic) and the demands for the individuality, uniqueness and realism that are associated with narrative content. A marriage in a narrative is (supposedly) a specific marriage, which really happens in all its complex and individual details in the fictional world; but, at the same time, it is a typical event with all its individuality stripped off - a building block of the narrative, perhaps as one of the components that helps end the narrative. Typical events in a narrative are called motifs. Folklorists catalogue motifs in folktales (naming and numbering them, tracing their occurrence across storytelling history).

Just as events in a narrative are both individuated and typical, so also characters in a narrative are both individual and typical. On the one hand, characters are representative of supposedly real people in the fictional world represented by the narrative. On the other hand, characters can also be seen as parts of the mechanism that drives the narrative from beginning to end; in this sense they can be labelled depending on their function in the narrative (this is the characters as elements of narrative form). This approach is particularly associated with Vladimir Propp, who suggested that typical characters in Russian fairy tales perform typical functions. Propp identifies a character function on the basis of the character’s involvement in specific types of event; for example, for Propp, the ’hero’ is the character function of the character who, in the fairy tales under discussion:

✵ is forbidden to do something;

✵ is sent off to resolve a lack;

✵ acquires a magical object;

✵ fights the villain;

✵ is marked (e.g. injured, or given something like a ring);

✵ is pursued;

✵ arrives somewhere unrecognized;

✵ is married and ascends the throne.

Propp lists seven character-functions, not all of which are clearly useful in all narratives. However, one in particular, ’the donor’, does appear to be found in many kinds of narrative. One specific character is often particularly important in enabling a narrative to move from lack to fulfilment. Donor (= giver) is the name given to this character, and typically the donor(-function) will give the hero(-function) some object that enables the hero to conclude the narrative by restoring the lack. In Propp’s fairy tales the gift is often magical (a cloak of invisibility, or a special weapon), but if we move beyond fairy tales to more realistic narratives we still find that there may be something magical about the gift (e.g. it may function unexpectedly, like a Bible carried in a shirt pocket that deflects a bullet). A typical type of donor is an old person who gives the hero(-function) something in exchange for a favour. Sometimes the gift is simply information (as when the dying character in a thriller gasps out crucial information with his or her last breath).

When we seek Propp’s character functions in more realistic texts, we may need to adapt them in this manner, interpreting the name of the character function rather abstractly. Thus ’the princess’ is just the character who is sought for by the hero, possibly because that character has been snatched by a villain. This means that the princess might for example be a kidnapped young boy; if the only family member otherwise involved is the boy’s mother then she might be classified as ’the father of the princess’. This is the power of Propp’s approach: it enables us to understand the characters functionally in terms of their role in the narrative rather than just realistically in terms of their identity.

Narratives permeate culture as a way of making sense, packaging experience in particular ways for particular groups and audiences. Thus, as part of the self-representations and imaginings of a culture, an individual can be classified on the basis of some characteristic - race, ethnic group, gender, age, sexuality, size, skin colour, etc. It is interesting to look at the relationship between a particular classificatory characteristic of a character and the function played by that character in the narrative. For example, in many contemporary American films an African-American character has the function of donor. The donor typically has a minimal presence in the narrative (usually appearing briefly) but has a crucial role in enabling it to develop and come to a conclusion. In any particular film, we could interpret the use of an African-American donor as making a historical claim: that African-Americans function as donor for the development of the ’narrative’ of the US economy. Or we could interpret it in terms of a contradictory position taken by the film with regard to racism, since it enables racial discrimination at the level of employment (the actor gets a small part) while carrying a positive message at the level of meaning (without this African-American character the narrative could not be resolved).