Characters: The Art of Reading Human Nature

Characters: The Art of Reading Human Nature is the fifth guide in the Themes strand of the Interactive Reading Guides. Since antiquity, the effort to know human nature has run in two lines: the outer line observes and maps types — the flatterer, the miser, the boor — while the inner line examines the self. This guide follows the outer line, the art of the character sketch, across two and a half thousand years, through the five figures who mark its history: Theophrastus, who invented it around 319 BC with his thirty moral types; La Bruyère, who raised it to its summit in 1688 with a satire of his whole society; George Eliot, who revived it self-consciously in the age of the novel; and Elias Canetti, whose invented grotesques carry it into the twentieth century. At the center stands Montaigne, the hinge, who turned the gaze inward and gave the outer line its enduring rival.
Along the way the reader meets the characters themselves — Theophrastus's Flatterer and Penny-Pincher, La Bruyère's Giton and Phédon, Canetti's Name-Licker and Woe-Administrator — the vivid, recognizable types that are the tradition's whole delight. A comparative section sets the five side by side, and a closing draws the two lines together: the character-writers who look outward at the many, and the self-examiners who look inward at the one, pursuing a single quarry by opposite roads. Beneath it runs one question — the type, or the self? — and a quiet recognition that the guide is itself an exercise in the very art it describes.
Part of the Interactive Reading Guides series, it is meant to be read alongside the original works, which it names but never reproduces; all commentary, including every description of a character, is original.