If charity begins at home, empathy for the writer begins at the forefront of all attempts at character development.
What do I mean by this? Simple: In breathing life to fictional characters, a delicate balance of good and bad attributes is required, a tally of characteristics tailored-fit and weighed in the literary scales to make the characters believable.
A reader should breeze past suspension of disbelief rather easily, and not stumble upon snags and rips in the characterization as to force the same to question or worse, disbelieve it.
Regardless of the fantastical ways characters are often depicted, especially in fantasy and the science fiction genre, readers must be able to relate to them, connect with who and what they are despite their being aliens, ghouls or personalities of lore.
The best and most engaging stories depict characters that are predominantly human, warts and all, even if such characters populate another, more alien world than our own.
Not only that, but the most unforgettable protagonists in fiction are the most intricate and complex kinds. Complex in the sense that in the author’s able hands, they are shaped and honed with qualities which are in direct conflict with one another, but never once do these features force disbelief in the reader.
Count Dracula, in Bram Stoker’s highly-acclaimed novel “Dracula,” is one such character. While the leading role was based on a historical figure, Romania’s Vlad III, the infamous Prince of Wallachia, or, as he is better remembered, Prince Vlad the Impaler, the fictional Dracula (meaning, son of the Devil) lived and breathed as both a monster with a thirst for blood and a human being struggling with the loss of his beloved Elizabetha and his faith in God.
The novel, written in epistolary form, delved into the existential questions of love and faith, of power and religious zeal, to say little of rage and betrayal, and what has been often neglected in the pursuit of understanding the darkest side of the human genus: its thirst for blood.
Stoker’s casting of a historically infamous public figure in the leading role of a vampyr—the dreaded Nosferatu—was nothing short of genius. In the author’s able hands, princely power and supernatural power meld seamlessly with the very human facility to grieve during a time of loss, and to feel betrayed by a God whom the prince had served zealously in the fields of battle.
In life, Prince Vlad the Impaler was ruthless bar none, leaving the memory of impaled corpses in his wake. Despite the brutality he had shown, history says he did what he did to save Wallachia from an even greater menace: the rampage of the Turks.
In fiction, Count Dracula was equally ruthless, egged on by a thirst for blood which was born from a sense of betrayal by God and the loss of a beloved through the treachery of the Turks.
While the fictional story could easily be lumped into the horror genre, Dracula the classical novel was anything but. In my humble opinion, it was one of literature’s best love stories ever to see print, the kind that merged humanity’s propensity to turn into a monster with the struggle to make sense of its worship of the divine.
In the end, Stoker drew on the irony of love to save the poor soul (Dracula soon discovered he was still capable of love through another woman, Mina, who was to be his killer in the end), so that even the likes of Dracula can find peace with himself, his loss, and his Maker.
What could be the most horrifying novel in the last century and a half drew on the powers of empathy to bring about a transformation no one knew was possible.
In Patrick Süskind’s macabre murder-mystery novel, “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer,” the main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, was anything but normal. He was born the fifth child and largely unloved boy of a syphilis-wracked mother in 18th-century France right in the center of muck, sludge and animal entrails.
Having been deprived of body smell, his strong awareness of the smell of others led him to become a perfumer, and thus in search of the most divine scent. Having learned perfuming from an old perfumer, Giuseppe Baldini, the boy now began his search for the mystery ingredient to create the divine perfume, one that would force people to love him.
The search led Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (French for “frog”) to conclude that perhaps the missing ingredient to create the divine perfume would come from the essences of human beings. He thus began his murder spree in order to extract this essence.
Some believe the fictional story was based on the real-life tale of Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta (1809–1863). Tagged as the “Tallow Man”, Romasanta murdered women and children and extracted their body fat to make soap.
In the end, he returns to his muck-ridden city and committs suicide by pouring the divine perfume—every single drop of it—on himself. The “love” he then won for himself was of such magnitude and intensity that those who caught a whiff of the perfume soon devoured the boy. He was his last victim.
In the complex lives lived by Dracula and Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the authors used poetic justice as their redemption.
Author’s empathy can be done in a variety of ways. José Rizal’s Simoun in “El Filibusterismo,” is another complex protagonist. As the new identity of Crisostomo Ibarra in the prequel “Noli Me Tangere,” Simoun the jeweler was Ibarra’s complete opposite. In “Noli,” Ibarra was in many ways a pacifist, burdened by his father’s death and his love for Maria Clara.
Returning to his country as Simoun, he now foments revolution against the colonial authorities. His plan to overthrow the government of colonial Spain was of such hate and intensity that he worries little even if his friends are killed in the process.
He soon plants a bomb hidden in a lamp (filled with nitroglycerin) on the occasion of the wedding of Paulita Gomez and Juanito Pelaez. The culmination of his plans includes the simultaneous bombing of all government buildings by Simoun’s comrades-in-arms.
Simoun’s plans are thwarted when Isagani—rejected by Paulita as a suitor for his liberal ideas—gets a whiff of the planned bombing. He rushes into house, grabs the lamp and hurls it into the river where it detonates.
He is soon cornered by soldiers, and mortally wounded. Simoun rushes to the house of Father Florentino while clasping his chest of riches. There he confesses with his true identity, his plans to overthrow government. The confession is long and painful, leading the priest to console him with these words:
“God will forgive you Señor Simoun. He knows that we are fallible. He has seen that you have suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement for your faults should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime, we can see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by one, the best conceived, first by the death of Maria Clara, then by a lack of preparation, then in some mysterious way. Let us bow to His will and render Him thanks!”
While some say that the struggle of Simoun was itself a reflection of Rizal’s own labor to make sense of his revolutionary ideas, it was clear in Simoun that the protagonist had all the intention of sparking the revolution had it not been thwarted by Isagani, another alter ego of the author, if you ask me.
The struggle therefore comes in the choice between him and friends who must suffer in the end for it, the latter being part and parcel of the wedding festivities. What was largely written as the author’s ideological autobiography redeems the protagonist through confession, and a vision of a future revolution of which the treasures he leaves behind will play a key and undeniable role.
The making of unforgettable characters, in short, begins and ends with the author creating people rather than caricatures. They must leave an impression strong enough and long enough for the readers to remember them even after the book has rotted away in their shelves.
How to do this? The poet Henry David Thoreau offers a suggestion: “Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
Imagine the people you create. Imagine them so well as not to cross the line between human and untouchables.
Image credits: Job Ruzgal