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...
In the production and reception of a narrative, there is often a
manichaistic distinction of characters into bad and good characters: the
good detective versus the bad criminal, the honest policeman against the
corrupted politician, the innocent girl, victim of a dissolute debaucher,
etc. This distinction covers a psychological need of the reader, the
illusion that the bad is finally punished, and the good rewarded. ... A literary
genre, detective stories, is based upon this distinction between good and
bad characters.
The reader, in the course of the reception, identifies with the good
characters. ...
The more a good character appears on the stage, the more we identify
with him. So dramatists, novelists and scriptwriters focus more often on
good heroes than on evil ones. ... We can see
better the function of identification in narrative by studying works which
fall outside the rule of portraying good characters. A good example is
Patrick Süskid’s best seller The Perfume1, where the main character is a
negative, wicked person. ...
Of particular interest is the fact that in certain versions of a story, from
the remake of a film to a new elaboration of a given myth, the main hero
changes character, from an evil one to a good one. ...
In the original version, the monk is a good character, who exposes the
wicked nature of the woman. In a later version however of this myth,
staged by the Peking Opera, the woman is a good character, who saves
her husband’s life, and the monk is a wicked character, separating the
young lovers from each other. ... In other words, good
and evil characters are the same for the author and for the readers as well. ...
4
Hunter, Americans are intended to be the good characters, and the
Vietnamese the evil. ... In the last few decades however,
Indians in films like The Little big Man (1970), starring Dusting Hoffman
and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, (1990), who has also the
leading role, Indians figure as good characters. Even where they don’t
figure as main characters, like in Jakie Chan’s Shanghai noon (2000),
directed by Tom Dey, they are allies to the good white characters. ...
In modern narratives good and bad characters invariably figure in sheer
opposition. When attempting to approach masterpieces of the past this
entails the danger of misunderstanding them, in trying to identify good
and bad characters. ... A modern reader, seeing or
reading the play, influenced by this manichaeistic code of reception
which distinguishes between good and evil characters, tends to see a
“good” Antigone, victim of a “bad” Creon. What we actually have,
however, is not a good and a bad character, but two tragic characters. ...
There are wicked characters who carry within themselves the good, but
which is revealed to us (and to them) only at the end, in the so-called
effect of the unexpected. ... The reader or the
spectator, identifying with the good characters who finally prevail,
defeating the evil in the imaginative sphere of the narrative art, soothes
his anguish and exorcises the evil which surrounds him.
Approximate Word count = 2820
Approximate Pages = 11.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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