Application of literary elements: Characters on Charles Baxter's 'Gryphon'

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, Coastal Georgia Community College, Brunswick, Georgia, USA (Coastal Georgia Community College, Brunswick, Georgia, USA), language: English, abstract: Fictional characters often appear to readers as real people with authentic actions, thoughts and speech even though they are an author's construct, intended to help a story to develop, to deepen and to come to life. Writer Robert DiYanni reasons in his book Literature: Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama that readers have to look into characters in order to find out more about "e;their function and significance in the story."e; (54)But what exactly is a character? The website Merriam-Webster Online defines character as one of the persons of a drama or novel , and a person marked by notable or conspicuous traits. Victoria Henderson, a student of the University of North Carolina, further points out within the Glossary of Literary Terms that [c]haracters are extremely important because they are the medium through which a reader interacts with a piece of literature. Every character has his or her own personality, which a creative author uses to assist in forming the plot of a story or creating a mood. According to DiYanni, characters can be identified as major and minor, static and dynamic (54). The major character is the dominating core of a story and is also known as protagonist whose conflict with an antagonist may spark the story s conflict. (54) Minor characters are generally used to support and illuminate the more significant individuals within the story (54).