There’s a good chance that at least one of the names that come up when you ask someone who their closest friends were when they were seventeen is a fictional person. Caulfield Holden. Bennet, Elizabeth. Finch, Atticus. Usually, the admission is accompanied by a slightly embarrassed laugh, as though the person is aware of how it sounds. However, the emotion behind it isn’t embarrassing at all; rather, it’s one of the more fascinating things that literature does to the human mind. It also raises an issue that is more difficult to resolve than it first appears: why do fictional characters occasionally feel more real, more familiar, and more present than the real people we spend our days with?
In Aspects of the Novel, published nearly a century ago, literary critic E.M. Forster identified a portion of the solution. He noted that true humans are fundamentally opaque to one another. Social codes and partial signals are how we communicate. We speculate about reasons. We misinterpret motives. According to Forster, what we refer to as intimacy is merely a temporary solution. Fictional characters, on the other hand, exist in a completely different state because the author is fully aware of them, and even when this knowledge is concealed, it gives the impression that they have a fully inhabitable inner life. We are inside a consciousness when we read a novel. In real life, that hardly ever occurs. Not at all.
It’s worth pondering how bizarre that is. The people we truly know—friends, coworkers, and relatives we’ve known for years—remain somewhat enigmatic. We deduce motivation from behavior. We speculate about the emotions that lie beneath the words we hear. However, within fifty pages of reading a book with a compelling first-person narrator, you might learn more about that imagined mind than you do about anyone you’ve spent ten years with. There is complete access. There is no longer any privacy. Paradoxically, this complete access is what gives the character a sense of realness because we perceive “realness” in people as precisely that feeling of knowing their inner selves, and fiction is the only medium in which we consistently experience it.
Scholars who are researching how readers interpret fictional characters have discovered something that challenges the comfortable belief that we can distinguish between them. Deep identification with a fictional character can actually change a reader’s own self-beliefs and attitudes, bringing them closer to those of the character over the course of a narrative, according to studies published through the National Institutes of Health. In other words, the brain does not completely separate fiction from the self. It allows specific characters to enter. It handles them in ways that are similar to how it handles intimate relationships and, occasionally, unsettlingly, how it handles the self. Reading this research gives me the impression that the mind is less able to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined than we typically like to believe.
What critics sometimes refer to as psychological coherence—the idea that even extremely flawed, even despicable characters have motivations that ultimately make sense—is part of what makes fictional characters so psychologically compelling. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert is a monster. In Nabokov’s hands, he is also nearly incomprehensible; his self-delusions, his terrible aestheticizing of his own crimes, and his justifications all flow from one another with a terrible logic. Seldom are real people like this. Real people are contradictory in unresolvable ways, self-deceiving without realizing it, and molded by forces they are unable to describe and would not acknowledge. Fiction does not assume that people are completely consistent. However, in hindsight, it does give them coherence—it shapes even their contradictions. And when a character feels authentic, we react in part to that shape.
It also has a safety feature that is worth mentioning. The reader cannot be judged by a fictional character. cannot abandon, reject, let them down, or misinterpret them. In the best way possible, the relationship is completely unilateral; the reader gives the interaction their whole attention, and the character easily receives it. This may be the reason why some readers, especially those who find navigating social situations in real life tiresome or painful, describe their relationships with fictional characters with a warmth and specificity they save for very few real people. The character is always accessible. On the final page, they were always exactly who they were.
This realization—that the emotional depth we find in great fictional characters far surpasses anything we consistently encounter in real life—should be liberating rather than depressing, according to author Aatif Rashid in the Kenyon Review. He wrote, “It is a testament to the power of imagination.” Readers instantly recognize the author’s creation of a kind of realness that reality itself cannot reliably provide because, somewhere, they already knew it was possible; they had simply not discovered it outside of a book. When you put it simply, that sounds almost depressing. However, it’s also, in a sense, one of the best justifications for why fiction continues to be important despite everything else vying for readers’ attention. The characters in books are familiar with us. We are acquainted with them. Absolutely. That has never been more common than it ought to be.
Chloe Olliver is senior editor at vclib.org, where she leads editorial coverage of literary criticism, political commentary, cultural analysis, and the evolving relationship between literature and public life across New York City and beyond. With a career spanning the intersection of literary journalism, political commentary, and educational publishing, Chloe brings both rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an accessible editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant.