What are characters made of? Textual, philosophical and “world” approaches to character ontology

Abstract

This article investigates three conceptions of fictional characters. The first, promoted by “textualist” critics such as Roland Barthes, regards characters as collections of semes, and insists on their subordination to the demands of narrative discourse. The second, characteristic of analytic philosophy and represented in this article by the work of Amie Thomasson, asks how statements referring to characters can receive a truth value, and ascribes to characters the status of “abstract artifacts.” Whereas these two approaches describe characters from an external point of view, namely the point of view of the real world, the “world” approach, inspired by Possible Worlds theory, theorizes characters from an internal point of view, the point of view of the storyworld. It is argued that once one adopts an internal point of view, characters are not imagined as incomplete creatures made of language, but as possible persons sharing the ontological completeness of the inhabitants of the real world: within the world of Macbeth, Macbeth is not a character but a normal human being. But not all referents of proper names in fiction present this status: it is argued that “characterhood” is a scalar concept, ranging from possible persons to referents of proper names who lack individuating and mental human substance.