ACTIVE CHARACTERS REVISITED

ACTIVE CHARACTERS REVISITED. I have been continuing to think about Annalisa’s post about active characters. It’s a new concept for me. I certainly agree about ALICE IN WONDERLAND. I didn’t like it as a child, and I didn’t like it as a grownup. I doubt that many children have liked it. I am now persuaded that the Alice’s passivity is one of the main reasons why I don’t like it. Characters that are passive observers do present a problem. Annalisa did not like GATSBY because she did not like the characters. She didn’t consider Nick Carraway to be an independent character. Henry James had characters he called ficelles (“strings”) that served only to manipulate the other characters. The problem is that a character that takes no action is not interesting and unlike anybody we encounter in real life. Ross McDonald, who wrote a number of detective stories about young men who go looking for their fathers and bad things happen, once said that his detective (active enough to be played once by Paul Newman) was only a story telling device.