6. Reaction
“The description of how the character reacts to various situations and events.” Usually, the author presents some conflict or problems that a
character needs to solve. In seeing how heshe reacts to that problem or conflict, the readers can see what kind of character it is.
7. Direct comments
“The reader gets the description or comment on a persons character directly.” Simple, the author directly gives the readers insight about the
characters through direct comments from the narrator or the other characters.
8. Thought
“The knowledge of what a person is thinking about is given by the author directly to the reader.” This is usually used in the kind of story where the
narrator knows all the characters’ thought. Providing the characters’ thought to the reader, the author gives the reader the nature of the
characters that heshe creates.
9. Mannerism
“The description of a persons mannerism, habits, or idiosyncrasies is given by the author.” A part of indirect characterization, the author
describes a character’s habitual actions or shows how heshe treats other people. By seeing those things, the readers can judge what kind of
characters heshe is.
Therefore, in the explanation for the characterization theory, Murphy goes into more detail than Abrams. This is because Abrams’ explanations were more
general while Murphy is more specific. Nevertheless, these two explanations support each other.
In this novel, the theory of character and characterization is useful to understand the nature of the character in the novel because with those theories, the
nature of the character, Kay, can be analyzed.
2. The Relationship between Literature and Society
As noted in the objectives of the study, this research aims to find the stereotypes that Kay, as a Chinese-American, face from Americans and how those
stereotypes make her confused about her identity. However, the society being studied in this research is not the real society and is only novel-based. The person
who experienced it, Kay, is also not a real person and only a character in the novel. This poses a question: Could we study a society reflected in the novel to
see the real society? Langland gives an interesting background to how this question can appear:
Studies of society in the novel often seem to share the assumption that, just as “a pudding is a pudding and a novel is a novel,” so, too, society is
society. We all know, so this argument goes, what we mean by society. Reflection should quickly inform us, however, that we would probably
reach no easy consensus in defining even the social environment in which we live. We experience an abstract concept, ideas about human
relationship, not a concrete, codified thing. If we cannot readily pinpoint society in our everyday lives, we must be equally cautious when we turn to
the novel, especially since a decade of poststructuralist and deconstructionist thought has made us acutely aware of language’s limit in
referring to any reality outside itself Langland, 1984:3.
Langland noted the common assumption about this kind of problem is always “society is society, a novel is a novel” which means people always treat these two
things differently. Society is being constructed by “abstract concepts, ideas about human relationships” and is not a “concrete, codified thing,” so it can be difficult
to portray a real-life society in a novel due to its “language limitations in referring to any reality outside itself.” Therefore, many people were skeptical about the idea
that the society in the novel can portray real-life societies. People also distrust the assumption that studying society in the novel can reflect its real-life counterpart,
because man creates literature, so a chance of individuality and subjective portrayal of society can happen. Besides, they keep on believing the language
will be limited in portraing the reality and hold the assumption that real-life society is too abstract to be portrayed in the novel.
Langland has given the background to how most people feel and think about literature and society based on the assumption that we cannot simply judge
a real-life society based on a novel’s or any literary works portrayal of society. However, as time goes by, many experts disagree with this view as they think that
a literary work’s society can portray a real life society. Among them are Wellek and Warren. They note that:
Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation. Such traditional literary devices as symbolism and metre are
social in their very nature. They are conventions and norms which could have arisen only in society. But, furthermore, literature ‘represents’ ‘life’;
and ‘life’ is, in large measure, a social reality, even though the natural world and the inner or subjective world of individual have also been
objects of literary ‘imitation.’ The poet himself is a member of society, possessed of a specific social status: he receives some degree of social
recognition and reward; he addresses an audience, however hypothetical. Indeed, literature6 has usually arisen in close connexion with particular
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