IRA NEWMAN
Virtual People: Fictional Characters through
the Frames of Reality
A great actress once expressed her appreciation
to Henrik Ibsen for writing such stimulating roles
for women. Ibsen, however, took exception to the
premise of the compliment. “I have never created
roles,” the playwright angrily replied. “I have writ-
ten of human beings and human destinies.”1
Ibsen’s pointed response is both revealing and
provocative. Revealing, because it tells us how one
narrative artist conceived the intentional content
of his fiction making: in Ibsen’s view it was not the
artifices of an artwork’s design or performance
that were the primary objects (or ends-in-view) of
his creative activities, but the real-life subjects that
were the inspiration for these fabricated forms.
Yet if this view is correct, one is provoked to won-
der what function, if any, the formal configuration
of character serves in the articulation of human
reality to which Ibsen draws our attention.
It is in the spirit of these reflections that I shall
explore the polarities of fiction and reality, each of
which functions as an anchoring device for under-
standing some aspect of a fictional character. First
I shall claim that while, on the one hand, fictional
characters are fully embedded in their discrete fic-
tional contexts, their intelligibility is enlarged by
the application of framing principles their study
shares with our understanding of real human be-
ings. I defend this claim by refuting several objec-
tions that tie the character too closely either to
the author who creates it or to the narrative arti-
fact of which it is a part. I conclude that fictional
characters are not entirely under the thumb of
their artifactual background but, for good logical
reasons, escape from constraints that their genesis
and structural situation seem to impose on them.
As a second claim, I propose that fictional charac-

c 2009 The American Society for Aesthetics
ters, in addition to benefiting cognitively from the
projection of actual-world structures onto them,
contribute to our understanding of actual-world
configurations by returning the projection back
to their real-world prototypes. Characters do this
by eliciting, from audiences who are bent on crit-
ically understanding them, puzzle-solving proce-
dures that become paradigmatic for illuminating
aspects of human reality. Focusing on these proce-
dures is one way to apply the notion of a paradigm
as shared example, which was set forth by Thomas
Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.2
i. fictional habitats
Like some exotic creature, thriving in an environ-
ment finely tuned to its distinctive needs, each
fictional character inhabits a fictional world of its
own.3 It would be odd, therefore, to find Ham-
let transposed to the fictional world of Oedipus,
where we would be asked to imagine his visit-
ing the mystical priest at the temple at Delphi.
Not just because a northern European (and Chris-
tian) prince would think the custom of oracular
consultation a peculiar one: focusing on such an
anachronism does not get to the heart of the odd-
ity. A more penetrating reason involves the inti-
mate connection that exists between the way the
fictional world is for Oedipus (including the psy-
chological and moral challenges unfolding from
the oracular warnings) and the exhibition of char-
acteristics that mark Oedipus’ distinctive mental
and moral character. And so upon leaving the or-
acle, when presented with every chance to avoid
killing Laius at the crossroads, Oedipus refuses to
74
bear the insult inflicted by his then-unidentified
assailant, surrendering instead to a rage that ends
with his act of patricide and ultimate pollution.
By contrast, Hamlet’s world is a hall of unreliable
mirrors, where its central character must assume
a moral stand under conditions of extreme uncer-
tainty over the ambiguous appearances that con-
front him. A deliberator, a vacillator often para-
lyzed by his own vertiginous calculations, Hamlet
is presented with the challenge of exacting retri-
bution on a murderous uncle: a task enhanced—
perhaps demarcated—by the way his world is for
him, where appearances are never clear enough
to yield coherent and decisive interpretations. In
each of these two cases, the world inhabited seems
a complementary fit, presenting just the right con-
ditions for stimulating those actions, thoughts,
virtues, and weaknesses that have come to define
Oedipus and Hamlet, respectively, as the kind of
psychological and moral person he is.
Maynard Mack offers a further refinement on
this conception by speaking of a “functional” rela-
tionship that ties the character firmly to just about
every salient feature of the fictional world in which
it is embedded.
The conception we have of Othello is a function of the
characters who help define him, Desdemona, honest
Iago, Cassio, and the rest; . . . of a great storm that di-
vides his ship from Cassio’s, and a handkerchief; . . . and
above all, of a language, . . . with many voices in it, gen-
tle, rasping, querulous or foul. . . . Without his particu-
lar world of voices, persons, events, the world that both
expresses and contains him, Othello is unimaginable.
And so, I think, are Antony, King Lear, Macbeth—and
Hamlet.4
But what does this “functional” connection be-
tween the fictional character and the fictional
world that “contains him” amount to?
ii. characterizing ‘character’
First there is some question about what a “func-
tional” connection between character and fic-
tional world means. If it means that the actions and
events of a character’s fictional life provide data
through which we can imagine who the person
is—in the sense of recognizing his or her psycho-
logical or moral character—then this is a clear and
correct statement: for unless we can cite events in
a person’s life, as well as the thoughts and actions
The Poetics, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Narrative
expressed in response to these occurrences, how
can we draw (and substantiate) any charactero-
logical conclusions about that person?
Can a claim proposing a functional connection
mean more, though? Can it mean that the con-
nection between the character and the particu-
lar features of the world he or she inhabits is an
internally related one—in which the individual’s
character is manifested only through that particu-
lar set of features and, moreover, is conceptually
constituted by that particular set of features? But
this interpretation cannot be correct, since we can
surely imagine an individual embodied in a differ-
ent set of events and behaviors who can still be
considered to exhibit the same character. This is
because by alluding to “character” we are refer-
ring, broadly, to the way one lives a life psycho-
logically and morally (which is expressible in the
language of general traits, such as dispositions, at-
titudes, commitments, and preferences); alluding
to “character” does not refer us to the particu-
lar concatenation of events, choices, and actions
that constitute the idiosyncratic history of a spe-
cific configuration in a dramatic narrative. And so
the pride of Oedipus or the vacillation of Hamlet
could remain constant through a variety of actions
and reactions.
Might I be inviting a charge of equivocation
here? This is because there are clearly two senses
of ‘character’ at work: character as a general psy-
chological and moral trait (call it character 1 ) and
character as an individual person occupying a
place in a narrative (call this character 2 ). To think
of character 2 is to think of a determinate set of
events constituting the narrative of that individ-
ual; in fact it is to think of that very individual (in
the same way as “the person one is” may be used
to designate the very individual whose narrative
is the life of, say, William Shakespeare). But to
refer to Hamlet’s character, and to mean by that,
a generalizable way that one lives a life, is to shift
to a different sense of ‘character’ and to trade on
the mere orthographic identity of the words used
to designate two very different phenomena.
Yet I think there is a linguistic argument that
can be made for shifting in this way, and if we
keep clear what we are doing there should be
no danger of equivocation. This is because the
way we conceive of realistic fictional worlds (or
worlds modeled on the actual world) is that for
the individuals who inhabit those worlds, ‘charac-
ter,’ as a term categorizing a certain set of personal
Newman Virtual People
attributes, directs us to conceiving a way of living
one’s life (character 1 ), rather than to thinking of
the determinate set of events constituting an indi-
vidual person’s history. And this is so whether that
history be conceived broadly as the chronicle of a
real person’s life or narrowly (and this would in-
voke the sense of character 2 ) as the concatenation
of narrated (or staged) presentations in a fiction-
ally narrated person. In other words, character 1
entails transworld applicability (or extension to a
range beyond the particular fictional world con-
cocted), where the same or a similar character can
be exhibited through the frameworks presented
by a number of different worlds of events. Thus
one can live one’s life in approximately the same
way, morally and psychologically, through a num-
ber of alternative sets of actions and events.
What we also can say about this linguistic point
is that it is based on a more fundamental meta-
physical one. If we take the fictional world to
be one we are invited to imagine as analogous
to the actual world we inhabit—and this would
surely be warranted by the correspondences in the
psychological and moral structures of the worlds
of Oedipus, Hamlet, and our own—then some of
the fundamental metaphysical patterns of the ac-
tual world would be projectable onto the fictional
world. Included among these would be the feature
allowing alternate futures to be possible within the
fictional world presented to us. For instance, in
the fictional world of Oedipus Tyrannus it is clear
that Oedipus might have chosen not to walk on
the road toward Thebes, Laius might have been
delayed, and the inebriated celebrant might not
have questioned Oedipus’ parentage—all of which
are genuine possibilities if the choices and occur-
rences in that world are to make any metaphysical
or moral sense. And so if event sequences and hu-
man choices might have unfolded differently from
the ways the dramatic artwork presents Oedipus’
behavior and the developments of his world, then
the relationship between the fictional world and
the inhabiting character cannot be a necessary
one, but as in the actual world, a contingent one.
(Generally speaking, then, we can say that each
realistically configured fictional world would have
an indefinite number of fictively possible worlds
within its domain, with the possible world that is
fictively realized functioning, as it were, as a fic-
tively actual world.) We can speculate then that
the impression of what I have called (in Section I)
an “intimate connection” between fictional world
75
and the character’s response to that world is due
more to the audience’s accustomed expectations
regarding components of a narrative with which
they have deep familiarity than to any structurally
compulsory fit governing the relationship between
fictional world and character.
iii. external and internal perspectives
Not to close the door too quickly on Mack’s func-
tional connection claim, there is a broader point
to be made here—one that accommodates both
sides of the issue at play. For despite the con-
tingency that does, in fact, mark the relationship
between character and fictional world, there is a
sense in which we have to agree with Mack that
we do identify, and virtually define, the character
by means of the specific events that occur to him
in his world: Oedipus, with the oracular message,
the chance encounter with Laius at the crossroads,
the marriage to Jocasta; Hamlet, with the ghost’s
injunction, the play within the play, the graveyard
ruminations, and all the rest. But close analysis
reveals that such an identification surfaces only
when—and only because—we have assumed a cer-
tain perspective, and that is an external perspec-
tive on the fictional world and its inhabitants: this
is where we focus on the fictional world’s fabri-
cation by a fictive generator (namely, Sophocles
and Shakespeare), who created, through the dra-
matic medium, this specific world with this specific
character.
Under this perspective, ‘character’ in fact refers
not to a person at all, but to a formal configuration
of certain elements of the dramatic narrative. In
a similar manner, when we speak of the “figure”
of Christ in a painting by Rembrandt, we do not
mean a person of a particular visual appearance
occupying the room depicted by the painting, but
the shape in the lower left quadrant of the picture
surface of that painting. Audiences who make the
identifications, as Mack does therefore, between
the character and the environmental elements in
which it is embedded are, in this way, focusing on
the dramatic dimension of “a play’s world, [under
which] each part implies the other parts, and each
lives, each means, with the life and meaning of the
rest.”5 That is to say, from the perspective of a dra-
matic artifact, the character and the components
of its surrounding environment play a mutual part
in constructing one another, and when we return
76
in imagination to Delphi or Elsinore under the
guidance of this perspective, we are turning our
attention processes to a dramatic (not to a fictively
natural) habitat.
But fictive imagination is dual, to the extent
that, in addition to the external viewpoint (which
is the perspective on the fictional world as a dra-
matic construction), there is an internal perspec-
tive that we also assume toward the fictional world
and its inhabitants.6 Under this internal perspec-
tive, we are invited to see fictional characters from
their perspective as agents and experiencers in a
world of events, and not from our perspective (the
external one) as audiences of fabricated dramatic
artworks. And their perspective, furthermore, is
analogous to the situation we are in as inhabi-
tants of the actual world, where we face an on-
going sequence of alternative future possibilities,
in the form of either chosen or nonchosen events.
To “imagine ourselves into” the internal points of
view of fictional characters is therefore to imag-
ine the alternative future possibilities that each
one faces in his or her world. And so in his world,
from the internal perspective, it is true that Oedi-
pus might have chosen not to walk on the road
toward Thebes, Laius might have been delayed,
and the inebriated celebrant might not have ques-
tioned Oedipus’ parentage.
So the conclusion that we properly draw is a
balanced one that explains the two contrary intu-
itions we have. On the one hand, it is a necessary
part of the way these realistic fictional worlds and
characters are fictively imagined that they do have
alternative fictive futures internally; at the same
time, from an external perspective, the fictional
artwork is a completed product and therefore pro-
hibitive of fictive futures offering alternatives to
the already determined sequences of events and
human choices.
iv. interpretive practices
If contingency marks the event sequences and hu-
man choices in the fictional world (when viewed
internally), then one of the tasks of interpretive
criticism begins to look remarkably like a compa-
rable task of understanding the psychological and
moral demeanors of people in the actual world.
To understand real people involves understanding
individuals who are faced with a limited number
of alternate futures they could adopt for them-
The Poetics, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Narrative
selves. Since any one of these futures is only con-
tingently related to the actions and temperament
of the individual (there being no necessity that it
should be adopted), it becomes a crucial part of
our understanding to determine why this (as op-
posed to that) future was adopted (namely, the
person’s motives), whether the person’s response
to the worldly events presented to him or her was
justified, and whether the person’s local or global
responses deserve assessment as either shameful,
honorable, shabby, proud, disingenuous, compas-
sionate, hypocritical, or all the rest of the moral
virtue vocabulary.
And the same is true for understanding fic-
tional characters, whose place in the narrative in-
side the fictional world can be made increasingly
clear by coming to plausible answers to such ques-
tions about motivation, justification, and moral
assessment. This is one of the tasks for thoughtful
critical interpretation of the dramatic work. There
are many other worthwhile tasks, as well, such as
tracing the intertextual history of literary forms
and language or analyzing the cultural conditions
leading to the work’s creation and reception. But
psychological and normative analyses of charac-
ter are also fundamental, not only to reveal some
exalted message or implied “truth” the work is ar-
guably communicating, but also simply to enable
the audience to “follow” the story of a person’s
life. We can refer here to Aristotle’s conception
of a competent narrative, as one marked by se-
quences of “beginnings, middles and ends,” and
so “following” the narrative involves the capacity
to understand why one event or human action suc-
ceeds another and in turn leads to a third.7 Clearly,
understanding why such sequences take place re-
quires understanding the reasons, motives, values,
and other temperamental features that were the
conditions adopted by the agent in steering the
sequence forward.
But there is a problem here. The required pat-
terns of explanatory coherence are not always per-
spicuous; therefore critical interpreters are often
challenged to come up with ingenious hypothe-
ses that provide explanatory lucidity. We recog-
nize quite easily that Oedipus was infuriated by
the arrogance of his assailant’s humiliating ges-
ture toward him, and it only requires an ordi-
nary, commonsensical explanatory generalization
to know that that was why Oedipus killed him.
Beyond that, however, proposed explanations be-
come murky, for why did Oedipus fail to control
Newman Virtual People
his emotions in the face of the oracle’s dire warn-
ing? No immediate or inferred answer is available.
Yet we want and need one. As a consequence, in-
terpretive zeal drives criticism to range far and
wide in search of explanatory frameworks, even
to recondite resources beyond the text’s content.
Are there limits to how far we are permitted to
go? Oedipus and Hamlet both present well-known
examples where interpretation has roamed freely
through modern psychological theories to offer
ways to explain the behavior of these decidedly
premodern characters. A critic such as John Dover
Wilson certainly thinks this liberal form of inter-
pretive practice is conceptually flawed, because in
his view,
[w]e are not . . . at liberty to go outside the frame of the
play and seek remoter origins in [Hamlet’s] past history.
It is now well known, for instance, that a breakdown
like Hamlet’s is often due to seeds of disturbance placed
in infancy. . . . Had Shakespeare been composing Hamlet
today, he might conceivably have given us a hint of such
an infantile complex. But he knew nothing of these mat-
ters and to write as if he did is to beat the air. We may go
further. It is entirely misleading to attempt to describe
Hamlet’s state of mind in terms of modern psychology
at all, not merely because Shakespeare did not think in
these terms, but because . . . Hamlet is a character in a
play, not in history. He is part only, if the most important
part, of an artistic masterpiece, of what is perhaps the
most successful piece of dramatic illusion the world has
ever known.8
How should we take this? There are two
points in Dover Wilson’s statement that warrant
consideration.
Let us take the second first, since it is the easier
one to answer. The claim that Hamlet is not a per-
son with a history extending beyond the frames
of the play is answerable rather quickly by using
the external/internal distinction I presented previ-
ously (Section III). Externally, from our perspec-
tive as audience members, Hamlet is a dramatic
construction in an artwork; but surely internal to
the world of the fiction Hamlet is a fictive per-
son with a history in his world. Much, if not most,
of his world is unseen (and unknown) by the au-
dience, since it extends well beyond the frames
of the text and in many cases beyond the reach
of the inferential reasoning patterns responsible
for the audience’s making reliable guesses. Yet
this world surely must be acknowledged as part of
77
the imaginative acts of make-believe in which the
audience is invited to engage, or else what sense
would it make to imagine that a human being of
some twenty or thirty-five years in age is the sub-
ject of fictional attention (as is Hamlet or Oedi-
pus). Fictional characters do have a (fictive) past
as well as a (fictive) future, if we are to imagine
them as the text’s logic clearly requires. For exam-
ple, Hamlet must have had an indefinite number
of interactions with his father and mother as he
was growing up; yet none of this, except for a few
brief summary remarks, is alluded to by the text.
Moreover, as Gregory Currie argues, if Ham-
let were assumed not to have a history extending
beyond the frames of the play, all the important
questions about why Hamlet delays, why he con-
templates suicide, and so on, would make no sense,
since these questions presuppose Hamlet is an en-
during human individual much like persons in the
actual world, with comparable psychological ca-
pacities, albeit idiosyncratic in the particular mix
of dispositions and traits that individuate him.9
v. authorial authority
Now let us turn to the first point that Dover Wil-
son makes, and it raises new concerns for us. Why
should the fact that Shakespeare did not know
of modern psychological theories exercise a veto
over efforts to apply such theories to explain Ham-
let’s behavior? The assumption behind Dover Wil-
son’s restriction is that the author’s commitments
about how the world works control the fictional
world he has generated through his fictive dis-
course. Now in some ways this has to be correct.
If Shakespeare presents a ghost speaking to Ham-
let, and if we do not interpret the event (as some
critics have) as hallucinatory, we must play along
with the fictional world Shakespeare has gener-
ated and accept its having spiritualistic metaphys-
ical dimensions. (Whether Shakespeare himself
believes in ghosts is irrelevant in this case: his fic-
tional invention may derive from a pure act of
fictional pretense on his part.) But why should
Shakespeare’s explanatory beliefs control those
fictive occurrences about which Shakespeare has
expressed no commitments at all in his fictional
creation? For example, if he believed melancho-
lia (or what we would call clinical depression) is
a disease of the bile, do we have to accept this
as a possible explanation of Hamlet’s depressive
78
symptoms? Or if he believed that celestial move-
ments determine the course of human affairs, do
we have to accept astrological explanations as pos-
sibilities for some of the key events in Hamlet’s
world? On any reasonable account I think the an-
swer should be no.
And the reason has to do with acknowledging
some limits on the excessive reach of authorial
influence. A literary theory of reasonable parsi-
mony is called for here, where the author (and his
or her unintroduced and unknown cognitive be-
liefs) is not granted absolute authority over what
we can and cannot infer about the behavior and
events of the world the author has created. The
achievement of Shakespeare was to generate a
complex fictional world, along with the imagery,
metaphor, and literary language used to represent
that world. And the richness of that representa-
tion derives from the subtleties of Shakespeare’s
characterizations of Hamlet and the other charac-
ters, driven in large part by what the author has
represented the characters as saying and doing,
how the author has juxtaposed selected bits of be-
havior and speech, and the like. This is more than
enough as an accomplishment. Shakespeare’s au-
thorial authority is not jeopardized by removing
from his capabilities one power, which has to do
with providing explanatory underpinnings for ev-
ery event and feature he has imparted to his fic-
tional world. And this is especially true for those
aspects about which he has not incorporated, in his
generated product, any explanatory suggestions at
all. Shakespeare’s role is to generate a world and
to represent aspects of it. Exploring and coming up
with explanatory frames of reference is a role bet-
ter left to others, who may bring to bear plausible
or distinctive insights (whether scientific, moral,
or otherwise) that may shed light on the complex
human situations that Shakespeare has had the in-
ventive genius to bring to our attention. And so
these “others” who do find illuminating possibili-
ties in modern psychological theories—or even in
more pedestrian resources from everyday life—are
entitled to apply their theories.
I do offer a qualification, however, by em-
powering Shakespeare in some unavoidable ways.
Clearly things will be different if, under the rules
of fictive imagination, the writer were to invite
us to imagine not only Hamlet and his world, but
also to imagine an explanatory theory of Hamlet’s
behavior, such as an astrological one. Of course,
we would have to find textual evidence to support
The Poetics, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Narrative
the view that such an invitation had indeed been
made; but if we did, we would have to exercise
the veto I earlier mentioned over those explana-
tory theories that conflict with Shakespeare’s fic-
tively embedded theory in the same way that we
would have to veto the populating of Hamlet’s
world with fictional characters beyond those that
Shakespeare placed there.
At the same time, it must be acknowledged
that this might not be an unqualified boon for the
writer. For one thing, if the writer were to invite
us to imagine a particular theory of behavior to be
governing the conduct of his or her fictional char-
acters, the writer would be competing with others
in the business of providing behavioral explana-
tions, and the writer might emerge from such a
contest worse off for having introduced an unper-
suasive explanatory framework. (At least the fault
might bother those audiences who considered cog-
nitive integrity an important evaluative dimension
of a narrative artwork.) Strangely, Plato’s skep-
ticism about the poet’s knowledge may actually
benefit rather than burden the credibility of the
poet, for the fact that the poet is no theoretician
relieves him or her of the obligation to provide a
theory and allows the poet to join, quite happily,
others (that is to say, later audiences) who will.10
There is a second disadvantage to accommo-
dating the writer’s invitation to include his or her
own explanatory theories in the act of imagining
his or her fictive creations. Such charity would be
a mixed blessing because it would elevate the ex-
planatory theory to a position of privilege over
fictive actions and situations that should be ap-
pealing on their own terms: for instance, as having
the merit of being well formed, coherent, challeng-
ing, salient, and the like. The dominance of the ex-
planatory theory in a work of fictional literature
has the effect of blurring the line between writ-
ers dedicated to generating independently worthy
fictional characters and narratives and the camp
of theoreticians who reduce fiction to the level of
mere illustration of an antecedently formulated
theory. A good example of a theoretician of the
latter sort would be Plato himself, who in the Re-
public uses a fictional account where a shepherd
comes upon a magical ring that confers invisi-
bility on him for the purpose of illustrating an
antisocial version of the theory of psychological
egoism. Namely, if the fear of getting caught in
an act of wrongdoing were removed, any agent
would act the way Gyges did: he would break any
Newman Virtual People
rule of moral and social decency if he decided it
was to his personal advantage to do so.11 Theories
of psychological motivation and social morality
have long been expressed through fictions; think
of the famous state-of-nature fictions proposed by
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and even Rawls. But
these fictions are one-dimensional illustrations of
what turns out to be the genuine object of intellec-
tual curiosity to both creator and audience: theo-
ries of explanation and justification.
And so in Plato’s case one is missing the point
of the example if one struggles to understand how
Gyges’ greed managed to win out over any feel-
ings of sympathy he may have had, or what his
alternative futures may have been like. This is be-
cause Plato tells us everything we need to know
about this figure, who functions more as a sim-
plified abstraction or a puppet designed to dis-
play only the action and motivational springs that
Plato (through Glaucon) has designed Gyges to
exhibit.12 Thus in Plato’s representation of Gyges,
there are no suggestions of pangs of conscience,
feelings of compassion, or moments of considera-
tion or conflict—for which, in view of the complex-
ity of human mental and moral traits, one would
expect some level of acknowledgment. (Think,
by contrast, of Shakespeare’s portrait of another
grasping individual, Claudius, who really does
struggle with the evil in his murderous and ac-
quisitive acts, yet admits to an inability to repent
[Hamlet III.3.35–72].) It is certainly possible to
quarrel with Plato over his fictional account; but
if we choose to do so we are entering into dispute
over Plato’s theory of psychological egoism, not
over the behavior of a character from a work of
literary fiction.
vi. propagating paradigms
Strictly speaking, the language of fiction invites
audiences simply to imagine the fictional charac-
ters the text generates, either through attending
to the representational content of the text’s fictive
descriptions or through drawing inferences from
these descriptions. Nothing more. But if an addi-
tional use for the text’s language unfolds, there
is no immediate reason to preclude its accommo-
dation by audiences in their imaginative attitudes
toward the fictional world and its characters. Such
a use emerges from the interpretive practices out-
lined above (Section IV), where, in attempting to
79
understand fictional characters more clearly, audi-
ences invariably plunge into considered reflection
on the fictional characters’ motives and the jus-
tifications and moral assessments the actions of
these characters merit. It is from this central (or
primary) process of critical interpretation that a
concomitant (or secondary) effect develops, when
audiences recognize aspects of fictional charac-
ters that lead them to reverse the prevailing pat-
tern of interpretive interest: from framing fictional
characters through the structures provided by real
persons to framing real-world people through the
structures presented by fictional characters. This
is what may be called the paradigmatic use of fic-
tional characters.13
But paradigms are notoriously promiscuous
items, consorting with such a wide assortment of
conceptual partners that one is hard pressed to dis-
tinguish a central cluster of meanings in their des-
ignating expressions. Thomas Kuhn, whose work
advanced the concept of a paradigm to a cen-
tral position in philosophy of science and in other
fields, has been described as using ‘paradigm’ in
no less than twenty-one different senses in his
seminal Structure of Scientific Revolutions.14 And
while I think several of the senses Kuhn articulates
present interesting possibilities for elucidating the
cases I have in mind here, I want to focus on one
that has an especially promising yet judicious ap-
plication to characters in narrative fiction. It is
the sense of ‘paradigm’ that Kuhn calls a shared
example.15
We are told by George Santayana and others
that great fictional characters are best viewed not
as types (or as reducible to sets of general proper-
ties), but as idiosyncratic individuals.16 This does
seem in keeping with the interpretive practice in
which critics and interpreters immerse themselves,
where they struggle to find out what makes Ham-
let (with all the systematic and nonsystematic pe-
culiarities of his particular psychology) tick, and
not just any waffler in general.
It is here, I think, that the notion of paradigm
as shared example finds application. According
to Kuhn, scientists have often solved important
puzzles by modeling their research procedures on
patterns of puzzle solving that have proven suc-
cessful previously in illuminating other particular
cases.17 Two features are noteworthy here. First,
the problem solving is not driven by resorting to
generalizations (such as rules or laws) but by the
emergence of a problem-solving pattern relevant
80
to that particular case. Conjoined with this is a
classification (by the inquirer) of a set of particu-
lar cases as analogous in a way that is conducive
to sharing the pattern of problem solving benefi-
cial in the primary case. Now consider how this
might apply to fictional characters. In the criti-
cal process of trying solutions to the problem of
understanding the idiosyncratic individual Ham-
let, it may (slowly) dawn on an interpreter that
there are situations in trying to understand real-
life individuals in which similar patterns of testing,
proposing, and accepting certain lines of explana-
tion and evaluation are accepted.18
For example, in analyzing Hamlet’s speeches
we may note contradictions so glaring that we
are forced to consider explanations that test the
character’s credibility. Can Hamlet really believe
contrary positions virtually at the same time, as
he does at the end of Act II?19 Or is a better
explanation to say that he believes only one of
the two positions, presenting the other only be-
cause it has the appearance of sounding plausi-
ble without, however, gaining Hamlet’s genuine
conviction? The shared example (or paradigm) is
this pattern of problem solving itself, which in this
case includes skeptically testing the logical coher-
ence of the character’s statements, followed by hy-
potheses about self-deception, hypocrisy, pretext
fabrication, and all the rest, considered as pos-
sible psychological and moral explanations. It is
this intricate web of cognitive maneuvers, involv-
ing processes of discovery and justification, that
serves as a pattern (or paradigm) for other situ-
ations of problem solving—in particular, for cases
of understanding real-life persons, their behavior,
and their character.
What results may be an expanding range of ex-
planatory possibilities. Specifically, we may grow
to understand the real person better by following
a pattern of explanations analogous to the one we
used in understanding Hamlet. Or, as may occur
after struggling with the challenges of decipher-
ing Hamlet, we may conclude the real person is
no more understandable than Hamlet is—our pat-
terns of reasoning in both cases leading down blind
alleys, albeit in analogously frustrating ways.
vii. feedback loops
To conclude this study, let us step back and
take a long view of its progression. In its first
The Poetics, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Narrative
phase, I proposed that explanatory patterns that
had proven successful in understanding real-world
people could be projected onto domains of fic-
tional literature that had realistic foundations,
with the aim of improving our understanding of
fictional characters, especially when puzzles in in-
terpretation emerged. But now in this study’s sec-
ond phase the pendulum reverses, as I propose
that problem-solving practices used in realistic fic-
tional contexts can be projected back onto real-
world settings, for the enhancement of our un-
derstanding of real-world people. This oscillating
sequence may actually be characterized as a feed-
back loop, where explanatory patterns projected
in one direction come back modified after having
encountered their prime target.
Of course the burden for claiming that genuine
feedback has taken place is to identify what in
fact has been added in the second phase, which
enables something enriched to emerge and to re-
turn to the original frame of reference (in the
actual-world context). For if nothing cognitively
new can be shown to have been added, it is more
reasonable to conclude we only have one explana-
tory framework—the original one from the actual
world—which finds itself doing double duty by
clarifying both the fictional context and any other
real-world context sharing a similar structure and
demand for illumination. But if the latter turns out
to be the case, then the road through the fictional
context is only incidental and conceptually of no
importance.
The answer has much to do with the character’s
“role,” as built into the fabricated structure of the
narrative—and which, curiously, in the introduc-
tion to this article, Ibsen had scornfully dismissed
as the intentional target of his creative activity. Ib-
sen would have done well to have adopted a more
balanced appraisal, recognizing the importance of
both the human reality that inspired his creation
plus the constructed artifice that constituted the
character’s configuration in the narrative. The key
dimension of the character’s realization in the con-
structed narrative is the form of the representation
itself; by this I mean, quite forthrightly, the text—
and those aspects of the character’s life, traits, ac-
tions, and so forth that the text presents to us,
either through overt description or through infer-
ence (which the audience is induced to draw).
More specifically, the representation realizes a
selection of some aspects of the character’s life
(as opposed to other possible selections), achieved
Newman Virtual People
quite often through the sheer power of the text to
juxtapose descriptions, speeches, actions, scenes,
figurative images, characterizations of other char-
acters, and the like: all of these contributing to
presenting objects of thought to us, many of these
requiring our efforts at problem solving. For these
objects of thought draw attention to some salient
features of the character’s ways of conducting his
or her psychological and moral life—always an
area that leads to questions because of provoca-
tive suggestions that surface about the identity of
motives and traits or about the determination of
justifications.
The stimulation of these problems surely oc-
curs in real-life settings, particularly if we agree
(with Ibsen’s assumption) that human reality is
the inspiration for the narrative constructs of fic-
tional character. Yet these problems (and the set-
tings that stimulate them) appear rarely, if at all,
in such clear and powerful terms in the unsorted
and multilayered confusions of our everyday ex-
perience. So by applying our epistemic practices
of testing, hypothesizing, explaining, and assess-
ing to the fictional situation, we have a distinct
opportunity to unfold an especially well-focused
and penetrating set of puzzle-solving strategies. If
the differentiating feature here amounted to no
more than our having an experience of how our
analytical tools can be used more effectively, that
would be addition enough to count as the cog-
nitive value added during this second phase. We
would then take away an experiential knowledge
of what it was like to think sharply about a human
being’s motives, traits, and justifications. But the
product of our cognitive processes will bear posi-
tive results as well, in the form of a more sensitive
set of cognitive procedures (and possibly proposi-
tional rules). We can then take this set away from
our encounter with fiction and reapply it to real-
world puzzles that we intuit have analogous struc-
tures to those puzzles we encountered in trying to
understand the fictional character. So our critical
journey through the fictional example will have
borne some genuine cognitive fruit for use in the
real world beyond fiction.20
IRA NEWMAN
Department of Philosophy
Mansfield University
Mansfield, Pennsylvania 16933
internet: inewman@mansfield.edu
81
1. Eva Le Gallienne, Introduction to Six Plays by Henrik
Ibsen (New York: Modern Library, 1957), p. xiii.
2. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revo-
lutions, 2nd ed., enl. (University of Chicago Press, 1970),
pp. 187–191.
3. In experiencing a work of fiction, audiences are invited
to imagine fictional worlds containing fictional characters.
Since these worlds and characters are only fictively imag-
ined, they are properly understood by the imaginer to have
no reality beyond their status as intentional objects of imag-
inative thought or of acts of make-believe. And yet their
ontology may become a subject for inquiry, when we want
to know what it is about the being or the structure of such
worlds and inhabitants that we are being asked to imagine.
We want to know, in this case, not the logic of fictional names
and descriptions (how can we refer to things or describe fea-
tures that do not exist?—a subject of considerable complex-
ity in its own right), but the logic of fictional imagination
(under the rules of fictive imagination, what inferences are
we entitled to make about the world that we are invited to
imagine fictively?). And though the conventional speech we
use to discuss fictional matters may appear otherwise (for
instance, as talking about fictional worlds and inhabitants
as if they occupy some alternate space-time zone alongside
the actual world), that speech should be viewed nonrealisti-
cally, as logically governed by a fictive operator (such as “In
the fictional story ____”) but as one that omits this operator
from discourse in the interest of rhetorical felicity.
4. Maynard Mack, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review
41 (1952): 502–523, reprinted in William Shakespeare, The
Tragedy of Hamlet, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Penguin,
1998), pp. 191–213, quote is on pp. 191–192, emphasis added;
all references to this article are from the Barnet edition. See
also George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York:
Collier Books, 1961), pp. 123–124.
5. Mack, “The World of Hamlet,” pp. 191–192.
6. See Peter Lamarque, Fictional Points of View (Cor-
nell University Press, 1996), p. 53, for the external–internal
distinction applied to character.
7. See Aristotle, Poetics 7.
8. John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd
ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 218; for other
references to Hamlet as a “dramatic artifice” as opposed to
a person, also see pp. 205, 208, 220–221. For an equally sharp
view of Horatio, whom Dover Wilson characterizes as “not
a person in real life . . . but a piece of dramatic structure,”
see pp. 235–236.
9. See Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990), pp. 59–60.
10. Plato, Republic 595a–603d.
11. Plato, Republic 359a–360e.
12. In a similar manner, Hobbes (in Leviathan, chap. 13)
tells us everything we need to know about why his natural
man lives a short, nasty life, and Rousseau (in A Discourse
on the Origins of Inequality) does likewise in telling us why
his noble savage develops vicious behavior upon moving to
a propertied society.
13. See Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth,
Fiction and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994),
p. 101: “Characteristics associated with fictional characters
can become paradigms in non-fictional contexts. For exam-
ple, names of fictional characters, like the names of well-
known people, can be turned into general terms. We can
82
speak of someone’s being a Roskolnikov or a Falstaff just as
we can of someone’s being a Quisling or a St. Francis. This is
a familiar, and rhetorically powerful, device for attributing
clusters of properties to a subject. . . . To say that John is a
Falstaff (or the Falstaff of the group) is not to make an iden-
tity claim but a straightforward predication. The properties
attributed to John are just those (or some of those) which
constitute the Falstaff-character” (emphasis added).
14. Margaret Masterman, “The Nature of a Paradigm,”
in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos
and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge University Press, 1970),
p. 61. Masterman groups those twenty-one senses under
three broad categories (p. 65). Masterman refers to the 1962
edition of Kuhn’s book; the 1970 (enlarged) edition, which is
the one already cited in this article, has several more senses.
15. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 187–
191. Kenneth F. Schaffner has pointed to this interpretation
in Kuhn’s 1969 postscript to the second edition of Structure,
and has applied that use of the term ‘paradigm’ in Schaffner’s
own “Exemplar Reasoning about Biological Models,” in In-
troduction to the Philosophy of Science, ed. Arthur Zucker
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996), pp. 258–265;
originally published in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
11 (1986): 63–80. My discussion extends exemplar reason-
ing beyond the biological and medical domains, on which
The Poetics, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Narrative
Schaffner has focused his analysis, to the area of literary
criticism where problems in understanding fictional charac-
ters are discussed.
16. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, pp. 125–126.
17. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 189–
190.
18. The validity of this correlation derives from my ear-
lier observation (Section IV) that the patterns of explana-
tion for understanding and evaluating fictional characters
are projected from those used in understanding real-world
persons. The focal directions here are merely reversed. Since
fictive explanations make use of real-world explanations, the
fictive explanations may, because of the richness and clarity
of their application in the fictional case, have paradigmatic
value in returning to cast light on their domain of origin.
19. In rapid sequence Hamlet first presumes the ghost is
telling the truth, then without any explanation turns on his
own expression of the ghost’s truthfulness, declaring his own
plan to test the ghost’s honesty and “catch the conscience of
the King” (II.2.559–617).
20. I thank William Seeley and Katherine Thomson-
Jones for their commentaries on earlier versions of this
article presented, respectively, at the Philadelphia and Mil-
waukee meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics in
2006.