Review of Related Studies

14 underlying the characters’ action. Those three elements are subordinate to the psychology field.

2. Character and Characterization a.

Character 1 Definition of Character Character is the most important part of a story, besides its plot and setting. Without character, there will be no story because stories are made to tell a tale of the character. Character is a reflection of a human individual in real life. In some novels which are autobiographies, the characters in the story actually exist in real life because the story is based on an actual person’s past experience. Abrams in his book entitled A Glossary of Literary Term 1993 clarifies that characters are the people in a dramatic or narrative work, interpreted by the readers as being endowed with moral and dispositional qualities that are expressed in what they say and by what they do p.20. By reading the descriptions, reader will be able to imagine and interpret the characters written by the author. In addition, Rohberger and Woods Jr. 1971 define character as a person who involves and acts out in a story in a particular time and place p.20 – p.21. It restricts the values of a character by means of certain time and place. In this study, characters are the people taking roles in the story. Those characters are alive in the real world of the author of the novel. 15 2 Types of Character There are several theories that can be taken into consideration to understand types of characters. Henkle 1977 mentions that according to the role the characters serve in the story, they could be divided into major and minor or secondary character p.87 – p.89. Major characters play most of the role in the story. They absorb the fullest attention due to the dramatizations of the human issues within the story that are laid on them. Meanwhile, the minor or secondary characters have limited function in the story. They only appear to populate the story world to make it more real. Abrams 1993 shares the same idea with Henkle, stating that the major or main characters become the focus of the events from the beginning to the ending parts. While secondary or minor characters appear in a certain setting and become the background for the major characters. Their roles in a story are just to support the development of the main character p.50 – p.56. Besides major and minor characters, characters can also be categorized as “protagonist” and “antagonist”. According to Altenbernd and Lewis 1966 in A Handbook of the Study of Fiction, the “protagonist character” is the ideal manifestation of norms and values that the readers admire. While, the “antagonist character” is defined as character that creates or causes conflict. In some stories, the antagonist is opposed to the protagonist directly or indirectly, mentally or physically p.59. Based on the characteristics, Perrine, in his book Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense 1974, says that in proportion to the fullness of the characters’