JentooEnglish Literature

AP® English Literature and Composition · Character (CHR) — Skill Category 1, Prose Fiction

1.B Dynamic and Static Characters (CHR-1.L, CHR-1.M, CHR-1.N)

A dynamic character changes inside, usually a belief, value, or way of seeing, because of what happens to them. A static character stays the same no matter what the plot does to them.

Watch it drawn5 questionsPractice

A story feels finished when the person at the center is not who they were at the start. That change is internal: a shift in belief, value, or way of treating other people. It is not the same as suffering or good fortune, which are external and can happen to anyone without touching who they are underneath. The real engine of dynamic change is translation: an external event gets converted into an internal one. Losing money, nursing a sick child, nearly losing someone in a river, these are things that happen to a character. Whether the character is dynamic depends on whether that event works its way inward and revises a rule, a fear, or a belief they have held since page one.

Once a character changes inside, that change has to go back outward, into choice and action, or the story has no way to show it happened. This is why dynamic characters tend to sit at the climax: their internal shift is what makes them choose differently than they would have chosen in chapter one, and that choice is what turns the plot toward its resolution. A static character can be hit just as hard by events and simply absorb them, repeating the same belief at the end that they stated at the start, sometimes word for word.

This sits next to protagonists and foils because static characters are often used as foils, fixed points against which a dynamic protagonist's movement becomes visible. Writers also use a static character on purpose: running someone through loss, prison, or grief and changing nothing in them is itself a statement, often a bleaker one, about how deep some beliefs are buried or how little the world can teach a closed mind.

Key terms

Dynamic character
A character whose beliefs, values, or way of acting change meaningfully because of the story's events.
Static character
A character who ends the story holding the same beliefs and values they began with, regardless of what happens to them.
Internal change
A shift inside a character's mind or values, as opposed to a change in their circumstances or surroundings.
Foil
A character, often static, whose fixed traits make a dynamic character's change more visible by contrast.
External event
Something that happens to a character from outside, such as a loss or injury, which may or may not be converted into internal change.

Watch it explained

  1. How it worksHow do external changes like losing money turn into internal changes in a character, and back again?
  2. How it worksWalk me through how a dynamic character's choices push the climax and the resolution of a plot.
  3. Worked exampleShow me the before and after of Ebenezer Scrooge as a set of traits that actually moved.
  4. Common mistakeWhy doesn't a character who suffers enormously automatically count as a dynamic character?
  5. Going furtherWhat meaning does a writer make by running a character through everything and changing nothing?

Check yourself

Your turnmedium1 of 3
In the 22 years covered by the novel, Halloran loses the shop, buries his wife, is imprisoned for 14 months on a charge that is later withdrawn, and comes out to find his brother in the house. On the last page he is at the same table in the same room, saying what he said on the first page: that a man is owed what he has worked for, and that the world will come round to it. He says it to an empty room now. The narrative gives him 7 chances to say something else and he does not take them. What does the passage establish about Halloran?

End of topic.

Next: 1.B Epiphany and Sudden Change (CHR-1.Z, CHR-1.AA) →