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Are fictional characters real people? Of course not. By definition. Even when they’re partially inspired by one or more actual people. But if they’re not real, why do we care about them enough to read fiction? Further, why has there been such a profound disconnect for the past several decades between general readers’ reactions to fictional characters, and those of many literary theorists, who tell us such characters are merely words on the page, and that it is absurd to speculate about their psychology, or their backstory? In college, I took a comparative literature seminar on novels that openly or - more often - subtly alluded in their plots to the life of Jesus. That is, the novels’ protagonists had the life of Jesus as a salient backdrop, adding depth to their characters. Our teacher later published a book based on the topic of our seminar (Ziolkowski, 1972). That course sensitized me to the possibility that a fictional character can have an important backstory - including one of literary allusion - that will enrich our experience with the book.
This issue was inspired by a book review. Evan Kindley of Pomona College, in the March 25, 2021 New York Review of Books, wrote an essay titled “The People We Know Best” (Kindley, 2021). Below the title appeared these provocative and generative statements: “Readers love fictional characters almost as if they were real people. Literary scholars are just starting to take them more seriously.” This tapped into longstanding concerns I have had about the direction that literary theory has taken, downplaying the roles of actual writers and readers of fiction. In the process, it has weakened its previously robust connection with a truly psychoanalytic view of the mind.
After citing a wide range of opinions about the nature of fictional characters, Kindley concludes, “A strange fact about academic literary criticism is that this … view [that of L.C. Knights, who wrote that fictional characters are ‘merely an abstraction … in the mi