Characterful Characters

Gregor Samsa

Gregor Samsa is deservedly recognised as one of the greatest fictional characters ever created, not least because of the way he is famously introduced to the reader in the very first sentence of Franz Kafka's 1915 story The Metamorphosis:

'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.'

That stark opening sentence seems to fly in the face of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's advice almost a century earlier – that creative writers should practice the art of suspending disbelief.

Yet as the sad story of Gregor's demise unfolds with such skill, we do suspend disbelief and imagine exactly what it would be like if we woke one morning to find ourselves in his unfortunate predicament.

We come to appreciate palpably what it must be like to lie in bed with a vast bulk that we have to rock to and fro in an attempt to fall on to the bedroom floor, fearing the noise it will make in the rest of the house.

Whilst the gruesome physical challenges Gregor faces are enough to evoke the reader's sympathy, it is the emotional aspects of his situation that we find most upsetting. The evolving story convinces us that Gregor's transformation is real, not so much through the descriptions of tentacles waving in the air or the shiny armour of his cockroach's body, but through the emotional vulnerability underneath the physical shell, the soul within the body no less. Initially Gregor's beloved sister Grete at least seems to have some sympathy for his circumstances, even if his father does not. But eventually even she comes to resent the vileness of his condition.

The reader becomes subsumed in a cocktail of nihilistic despair, with Gregor Samsa becoming the very personification of human frailty with his stoical suffering, alienation, rejection and ultimate death.

Not the most cheerful of stories perhaps, but a phenomenal fictional character nonetheless…!

Characterful Characters: Christopher Tietjens

It is usual, particularly in a story running to almost 300,000 words, for a protagonist to be a sympathetic character. Yet Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade's End begins inauspiciously in this respect. We are introduced to Christopher Tietjens as someone born in a pre-Edwardian time warp, who is introverted, socially awkward, something of a stubborn oaf, and who possesses the type of fierce intellect that many of us find both intimidating and infuriating.

Additionally, it seems improbable that we as readers will grow to like, or at least identify with Tietjens, because virtually all the other characters in Parade's End find him difficult.

Tietjens is an edifice in the shape of a noble character, encapsulating patience, courage, high moral consistency and a vehement sense of justice. But in a perfect metaphor for the period around the First World War, his edifice crumbles with his experience of the trenches, his wife’s infidelity and the moral vacuum that succeeds these conflicts.

As he disintegrates, we come to acknowledge that we would do exactly the same in his circumstances, and it is this empathy that subsumes us and draws us into identifying with him.

But does he find redemption? The brilliance of Parade's End is that it is left to the reader to conclude whether Tietjens finally reaches some form of reconciliation.

The narrative arc written for Tietjens is well suited to this novel's modernist form, using sudden shifts in time and point-of-view as well as stream of consciousness to capture the discursive way in which we struggle to make sense of the world.

Indeed it's tempting to think that Ford tells this story with another grand metaphor in mind – Tietjens' transition from the starched orderliness of the Edwardian era to the incoherent ambiguity of the 1920s exactly mirrors the trajectory of fiction writing itself with the rise of modernist literature, for which Parade's End is a beacon.