JentooEnglish Literature

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

1.A Who Is Doing the Describing (CHR-1.B, CHR-1.H)

Every description of a character passes through someone with a stake in how that character looks. Read it as evidence of the describer's motives and position first, and the character second.

Watch it drawn4 questionsPractice

A description is never neutral. Someone is always doing the describing, and that someone has a relationship to the person described: envy, love, resentment, loyalty. The facts reported might be accurate, but the selection of which facts to mention, the order they come in, and the words chosen to color them all belong to the describer. So before asking what a passage tells you about a character, ask who is telling you and what that person wants you to feel.

Nick Carraway narrates The Great Gatsby, and he admires Gatsby even while cataloguing his criminality and self-invention. That admiration shapes everything: Nick lingers on Gatsby's smile, his hope, his devotion to Daisy, and gives comparatively little weight to the fraud underneath. The portrait of Gatsby readers receive is Nick's Gatsby, built from Nick's loyalty, not a transcript of objective fact. A character's own self-description works the same way in reverse: people explain themselves in ways that flatter their self-image, so a self-portrait reveals what a character needs to believe about himself, often more than it reveals the truth.

This matters most when a character is described only by an enemy or only by one interested party. Without a counterweight, the reader has no way to check the account against another viewpoint, so the gap between the description and the person becomes the point. This is why the skill connects to protagonists and foils and to characters who change: a foil's contrast, or a character's growth, is often visible only through how differently two describers render the same events.

Key terms

Unreliable narrator
A narrator whose account is skewed by bias, self-interest, or limited knowledge, requiring the reader to read past the surface.
Self-characterization
What a character reveals about themselves through their own words, often shaped by self-flattery or blindness.
Foil
A character whose contrast with another character sharpens the reader's sense of both, often through differing descriptions.
Interested party
Any describer who has something personal to gain or lose depending on how a character is portrayed.

Watch it explained

  1. How it worksHow does a description of a character get bent by whoever happens to be doing the describing?
  2. How it worksWalk me through how Nick Carraway's admiration warps the portrait of Gatsby he hands the reader.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't a character's own account of themselves the version the author wants you to believe?
  4. Going furtherWhat happens to a character whose only description in the whole text comes from their enemy?

Check yourself

Your turneasy1 of 3
Everything we learn of Verrall we learn from Dunn, who had kept the ledgers for 20 years and was passed over when Verrall arrived. Dunn writes that the man has a agreeable voice and an easy way with the partners, that he was given the window desk within 7 days of walking in, and that such men rise because the world is arranged for them. He notes that Verrall's figures have not yet been found wrong, and adds that there has not been time. He records the day, the hour, and the colour of the coat Verrall wore. What does this account most reliably establish?

End of topic.

Next: 1.A Perspective and What Shapes It (CHR-1.C, CHR-1.D) →