Aristotle: Action is Character

Although I usually don't like Aristotle, I believe much of what he says about tragedy in Poetics is true: "For (i) tragedy is a representation not of human beings but of action and life. [...] [P]eople are of a certain sort according to their characters, but happy or the opposite according to their actions. So [the actors] do not act in order to represent the characters, but they include the characters for the sake of their actions" (Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism 93). As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notes on his last novel, The Last Tycoon, "ACTION IS CHARACTER." And, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. When we see a movie or a play, we don't really have the knowledge we need to judge a character on who they are as a person. All we're given is what they do. Hamlet, for example, is probably not someone many playgoers see as being level-headed or right; on the contrary, it's likely that we wouldn't see Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird as a villain, because everything Atticus does in the book is in order to help his children or his doomed client. Atticus says on page 33 of To Kill a Mockingbird, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Since we, as the viewers or readers, aren't able to know characters on a personal level, viewing these characters by their actions is the only way we're able to "climb into [their] skin." Apart from soliloquies, which are few and far between, in a play we're not given too much insight into someone's soul. Aristotle's demand that a tragedy include defining action for a character is vital for the development of a character in the eyes of the viewer or reader. As Aristotle says in On Rhetoric, "[C]haracter is almost, so to speak, the most authoritative form of persuasion."

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground Man in his novel Notes from Underground is the prototype for the Anti-hero, who is paralyzed by his or her fear of action. We are told the story of the Underground Man from the Underground Man himself, so we are seeing who he is by his thoughts and words. Although it's obvious that the Underground Man yearns to have companionship, he is paralyzed by the fear that he will be humiliated and judged. On one occasion, the Underground Man coaxes Liza, a prostitute, to his home under the pretense that he is interested in more than just sex. Liza thinks that he sees her as a person. The Underground Man, almost threatened by the possibility that he and Liza could be friends or even lovers, ends up blasting Liza with insults, which crushes her. From Liza's point of view, the Underground Man is simply cruel, but we know that he is using his cruelness as a defense mechanism. It is the Underground Man's INACTION that causes him to plummet even deeper into isolation, and this is why, I think, Aristotle makes such a big deal out of characters being defined by their actions rather than the other way around; at the end of the day, it's not what we believe that makes a difference-- it's what we DO.

Ode to the Anti-hero