Not Every Character Needs A Wounded Past (Part 2)
2 more types of characters who don't need wounds
Chapter 4 of “The Apothecary” is now live! The fairy queen’s hold on the duke grows stronger, but her power over the prince is just as poisonous. Will you spy for the duke or lie to the prince? Choose your path…
Not Every Character Needs A Wounded Past (Part 2)
In Part 1, we looked at two types of characters who don’t require a tragically wounded past (Naive, Static) and the two elements most needed to enhance those types of character (Mentor, Exaggerated Counterpart).
Today, we’ll look at two more character types (Archetypal, Flawed/Weak) and two elements the help enhance those types (Unreality, Humor).
In the (paywalled) Workshop section at the end of the post, we’ll also look at one character who embodies all four character types, and whose novel makes use of all four enhancing elements.
3. Archetypal Characters Need Unreality
Some characters aren’t meant to feel like real people but rather like archetypes. This is true of Sherlock Holmes and other detectives, and it might also be true about Frodo and other fantasy-novel characters. (I talked about both Holmes and Frodo in Part 1 of this topic.) Their stories aren’t meant to be wholly realistic. Instead, they have a mythic quality to them, signaled by a level of unreality somewhere in the text: Holmes’ ability to draw entire narratives from seemingly insignificant details, Frodo’s home in the paradisaical Shire and his escape from forces of pure evil. In such fables, characters aren’t required to be complex; they’re mythical figures, stand-ins for ideas like “cleverness” or “innocence.”
Even in contemporary fiction, in familiar settings, archetypal characters emerge. In Emma Cline’s The Guest, Alex spends each day searching for a place to stay for the night. She steals from strangers and lovers, ruins expensive artwork, violates people and norms. She claims “there wasn’t any reason” for her offensive behavior, “there had never been any terrible thing” in her past. How, then, did she come to be such a helpless, callous, selfish person? A wounded past would explain her actions and make her into a sympathetic character. In absence of a wound, Alex is a cipher.
But she’s also able to represent an idea—that of the eternal guest—so that readers can move their focus from exploring Alex to exploring what it means to be powerless and shiftless, invited and then unwanted. Readers can draw parallels to real people who have had to rely on their ability to please others, either through their own faults or because they’re trapped in systems of inequality. Or maybe readers simply use Alex’s story to reflect on the anxieties that come with being a house guest!
The reason Alex feels like an archetypal character instead of a flat, unfinished one is that there’s a touch of unreality to her story. The plot feels dreamlike: Alex spends her time floating in the ocean, and taking floaty painkillers, and drifting from house to house. She keeps seeing terrible omens: spots of blood, a terrible pink stye in her eye.
While the events of the story are realistic (her dishonesty draws suspicion, her actions come with consequences), there’s a satirical exaggeration to the dialog (“Our art needs more technology and our technology needs more art”), and a dreamlike quality to the tone (“How odd the ocean was at night—strangely placid, the waves unfurling in polite afterthoughts on the sand”) that signals this story is one long, unending bad dream. In fact, the story never comes to a resolution, much to the displeasure of many readers (though not this one).
Archetypal characters certainly can have wounds. (To me, Katniss Everdeen reads as a bit of an archetype, for example, and she is quite wounded by a childhood absent of parents and food.) But an archetypal character without a wound needs to exist in a story that’s somewhat unreal if we want to signal to readers that this character is meant to represent an idea and not an actual person.
4. Flawed/Weak Characters Need Humor
While flawed characters often have wounds, they don’t require wounds. They might have been shaped by a past tragedy, but that tragedy doesn’t have to have left them wounded.
Famously, the opening of Emma tells us that the titular character bears not a single wound: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich… had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” It’s true that Emma has grown up without a mother, but Emma’s governess has stepped in to fill that void, treating Emma with “affection” so that Emma has “no more than an indistinct remembrance” of her mother, a fact that is never reflected on with sadness.
Although her mother’s death hasn’t wounded Emma, it has led to Emma’s greatest flaw: she has “rather too much of her own way.” Emma will go on to meddle in everyone’s romantic affairs, to ridicule a poor neighbor, and to accidentally break the heart of the local vicar (until she’s finally schooled into greater maturity by her mentor and love interest, Mr. Knightly).
Emma’s flaws don’t point toward a sad past or a pained deficiency; instead, they’re generally funny and charming, as are her father’s flaws. Perhaps because of his wife’s premature death (this is suggested more by the miniseries than by the novel), Mr. Woodhouse is overly cautious about matters of health, to the point that when he attends the governess’ wedding, the cake becomes “a great distress to him” and he “earnestly tried to prevent anybody’s eating it.” Such a great bit of subtle humor!
When the worst event of a character’s past leads to more humor than pain, we can forgo thinking about wounds and instead focus on flaws. If we don’t see characters experiencing real pain as a result of a past wound, we’re able to laugh instead of cry, and this laughter is often a way of acknowledging not only the characters’ flaws but our own. (Aren’t we also a little vain and meddlesome, a little too phobic in matters of health?)
For some characters, this vague wound leads not to flaws but to weaknesses—vulnerabilities that they have no recourse against. More on this in the Workshop section below.
Either way, a terrible past event doesn’t always need to create a tragic character. Flawed (or weak) characters can be fascinating without any wounds. ●
Your Turn
If you’re looking to enhance a character who has no wounded past, ask yourself these questions:
What idea might my character represent, and how can the setting or plot reflect that?
How can I illustrate my character’s past misfortunes to comic effect?
A Deep Dive into the Character With No Wounded Past: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Let’s look at how the main character from an enduring children’s story manages to serve as an effective stand-in for the reader.
Charlie Bucket embodies all four character types (Naive, Static, Archetypal, Weak), and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory makes use of each of the four elements needed to enhance those types (Mentor, Exaggerated Counterpart, Unreality, Humor).