Not Every Character Needs A Wounded Past

4 types of characters who don't need wounds

Every person on earth can answer the question, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” Many people can see how their answer has shaped part of their identity. Which means the easiest way to add complexity to a character is to explore a wound from the character’s past. In fact, readers love to learn about wounds. These character-shaping tragedies are fascinating, and not just for prurient reasons; they also provide wounded readers (and isn’t everyone at least a little wounded?) with a catharsis, a release of pain and anger built up from our own pasts.

But not every story calls for a wounded character. How then to make a character fascinating, sympathetic, memorable, if not with a wound? Let’s look at four types of characters that don’t require a wounded past (Naive, Static, Archetypal, Flawed/Weak), and the element most needed to enhance each type of character (Mentor, Exaggerated Counterpart, Unreality, Humor).

1. Naive Characters Need A Mentor

Some stories don’t just allow for a non-tragic character, they require a character utterly unmarked by misfortune. The role of this character is to be naive to the ways of the world, because the story is about their education into some darker aspect of life.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s naiveté is exemplified by the famous moment when he offers to deliver the one ring, a token of evil, to the fires that will allow for its destruction—“Though I do not know the way,” he says. What an understatement! He has no idea what will be required of him before the task is finished, because he has never had a brush with evil or even lasting hardship.

Before this, he has lived a pleasant life in the Shire; although orphaned at a young age, he seems to have lived happily among relatives with nothing to trouble him other than a faint regret at never having adventured with his uncle, Bilbo. Frodo’s unblemished life means there is little in him for the evil ring to distort. And his simple ambition to carry the ring to its destruction, rather than to use it to gain power, makes him nearly incorruptible. At the very least, he’s the character who can carry the ring the farthest toward its doom.

The absence of tragedy in his life also allows for a mentor to teach him (and, by proxy, the reader) about the nature of evil and the methods to overcoming it. When Frodo first learns about the dark lord Sauron and his return to power, he tells Gandalf, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” Gandalf, a wise mentor, replies, “So do I… and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Such poignant wisdom! I don’t know a single person who has read the book or watched the movie who hasn’t been affected by this line. What a gift to the reader.

Many other actions taken by Frodo and his fellow hobbits, including Frodo’s misplaced trust in Gollum, Pippin’s Pandora-like discovery of the powerful palantir, and Samwise’s eavesdropping, exemplify naive foolishness—and often allow for a mentor to correct such foolishness. The reader thereby learns the same lessons the hobbits learn.

Alice passes around plum cake before cutting it

Other stories centered on naive characters provide terrible mentors, but to similar effect. A mentor who teaches evil ways to an innocent can school the reader in the nature of greed or selfish ambition. A comic mentor, like those who impart illogical lessons to Alice during her adventures in Wonderland, can reveal the absurdities of life. After Alice passes through the looking glass into a land where ten-minute breaks are allowed during fights for the crown, she learns that in order to serve plum cake she must “carry it round first, and cut it up afterwards.” I always think of this quote whenever I encounter strange rules for social situations.

Sometimes, instead of life lessons, mentors teach a naive character a particular skill, as Sherlock Holmes does for Watson…

2. Static Characters Need Exaggerated Counterparts

Static characters are those who don’t grow or change over the course of a story. They need no wound to recover from, no tragic past to grow out of. Instead, static characters tend to serve as a stand-in for the reader. This type of character is defined not by the past but by curiosity or some other simple motivation to enter a strange world or come into the orbit of another, over-the-top, character.

Dr. Watson is the most famous example of this kind of static character. He’s meant to play the part of the reader: he comes up with logical, thoughtful conclusions to mysterious happenings based on the clues he’s presented with. And he’s always wrong. Only Sherlock Holmes, whose genius is so acute that it’s impossible to ever truly buy into (which is fine—we read his stories almost as fantasy stories), can solve the mysteries the pair attempts together. Holmes is Watson’s exaggerated counterpart.

The same is true of Hastings and Poirot. Poirot has his fastidious habits, his favorite phrases (“little grey cells” “mon ami”), and his insistence on “method.” Hastings simply follows him around making reasonable but incorrect conclusions so that Poirot can school him on the proper method (a method that is just as fantastical as Sherlock Holmes’). And it’s also true of Horowitz and Hawthorne, a modern mystery novel pairing. The author himself (Horowitz) serves as a static narrator, only ever concerned with his deadlines and whether interviewees like his novels, while the real detective, Hawthorne, points out the correct way to interpret clues. Hawthorne is a secretive, off-putting genius who lives oddly (eats little, obsesses over modeling kits), and whose genius is so over-the-top that it’s often doubted by the establishment.

In fact, these exaggerated counterparts don’t grow or change either. Holmes, Poirot, and Hawthorne, (and all other detectives I’ve encountered in fiction), only need to astonish us with their genius. If they have wounds, we’re not familiar with them—because we don’t need to see wounds healed in a riddle-story. We only need to solve the riddle.

The famous Gatsby meme

But it’s not only mystery novels that feature pairings of static and exaggerated characters. The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Caraway, who served in WW1 but doesn’t seem to have been physically or emotionally wounded by the fighting (he even claims to have “enjoyed the counter-raid”). Nick is looking to get into the bond business when he arrives in East Egg, a simple motivation for the start of a story. He has few defining characterizations, other than that he is quiet and Midwestern.

By the end of the novel, he does change in that he learns that the upper-class is superficial and that the desire for wealth corrupts. But he doesn’t change much; he’s still callous enough to break up with Jordan over the phone, and he still admires Gatsby, even though he knows Gatsby and his world are built on greed. His only maturity is earned not by facing his own wounded past (he seems to have none), but by understanding the wounded past of Jay Gatsby.

Gatsby is such an over-the-top character that Leonardo DiCaprio’s depiction of him became a famous meme (think tuxedo, champagne, fireworks). Nick’s job is to provide readers with a window into Gatsby’s life. (In fact, Gatsby serves as a mentor to Nick, teaching him about the ways of the wealthy and driving him around Long Island). We better understand Gatsby by getting an outsider’s view of his glamorous ways (the car, the endless parties, the enormous house), and, after Nick gets to know Gatsby better, an insider’s look at Gatsby’s falseness (the invented past, the illegal income, the deluded certainty that the upper classes are open for enrollment). Even Gatsby’s world is over the top: cars speed around with little care, people whisper and dance and drift through host-less parties, a rich woman cries under a pair of “such beautiful shirts,” and God watches all from a pair of painted eyes on an optometrist’s billboard.

Characters who have no wounds work well as guides to other characters and worlds because they don’t need to explore their own pasts. They just need to explore the characteristics or skills of their exaggerated counterparts.

Next week, we’ll look at the other two types of characters who don’t need a wounded past (Archetypal, Flawed/Weak) and two elements that help enhance those types (Unreality, Humor). We’ll also look at one character who embodies all four character types, and whose novel makes use of all four enhancing elements. ●

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Your Turn

If you’re looking to enhance a character who has no wounded past, ask yourself these questions:

1. What’s the most important thing my character needs to learn about life itself, and how might a mentor teach this?

2. How can I play up the contrast between my static character and an exaggerated character?

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