Post 15

“Who is involved, and why does it matter?” are two important questions when dealing with any literature. Characters play a crucial role in developing points of the story and the values of the author. The experience that characters bring must be observed “outside ourselves” in order to make “our world bigger.” In order for us to get anything out of characters we must have some level of curiosity that drives us to want to know them and understand there purpose. We are drawn to people the same way. We must hone in on this curiosity in order to get the full value of text.

So a major point which characters is to engage with them the same way we engage with people we encounter in person. In David St. John’s My Tea with Madame Descartes, the narrator uses a great deal of the poem to develop how Madame Descartes looks. We immediately get some idea of the characters without even knowing through things she has said. We often, and the majority of the time, do the same in person: we often get an overall idea of the person simply by looking at the them, observing their outward traits, and their gestures. And that is not way it is wrong to do so, because often times our first impressions are true to some extent.

However, we also develop an idea about someone through careful dialogue with them. We have learned this in class in our groups and our ongoing course dialogue. We have begun to understand how we will interact with people which in turns give some perspective on who the person is. The same goes with literary text. We often do not have the narrator bulking up a story, detailing the characters and their purpose. The interaction, the dailouge shared between the characters often does an adequate job to fulfill those means.

Overall, reading the chapter on Character and reading the poem has developed an important fact about literature: “we engage with characters as we engage with people.”