The textbook I used early in my career encouraged students to think of characterization in a binary way — either it was direct or indirect. The definitions went something like this:

Direct characterization is a literary technique in which a narrator or another character explicitly describes a character’s traits, qualities, or personality. Instead of allowing readers to infer characteristics through actions, dialogue, or thoughts, the author directly states information about the character.

Indirect characterization is a literary technique in which an author reveals a character’s personality, traits, or motivations through the character’s actions, dialogue, thoughts, appearance, and interactions with others, rather than stating them explicitly.

This framework proved valuable. My students could easily spot what was said directly about a character and visualize it. But the onus was on them to do the critical thinking. There were revelations to be had based on all the things that a character did and didn’t do.

Last year, when we read The Great Gatsby, students plugged in direct characterizations of Tom Buchanan into an AI art generator. Lines like, “He was a sturdy, straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner,” along with others, led to images like this:

One of the first introductions to Jay came via the indirect route, showing that “He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way…”

The ambiguity of his “curious way” led to a fascinating conversation in which students saw hope, longing, distance, idealism, separation, loneliness, and ambition in those outstretched arms.

Since then, I’ve discovered new conceptual frameworks that I like much better because they achieve a nuanced and complex understanding of characterization.

NEW FRAMEWORK #1 (P.E.P.)

The first comes from an AP Daily video from Carlos Escobar, who synthesizes three aspects of characterization into a graphic organizer in which students list the physical, emotional, and psychological (P.E.P.) qualities.

This approach proved invaluable with my favorite short story of all time, Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.” If you know the story, you know Carver holds back. There is no description of the narrator, no age, no hair color, no height, no attire. We are blind to his physical appearance.

My students start to see the point when they work through this Google Slide in groups. The physical column is empty, but there is so much to record about his emotional characterization (how he feels) and his psychological characterization (how he thinks).

Here are examples of what students said, with evidence from the text to support it:

Emotional

Spiteful – “So okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said good-bye 2 to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer and she moved away from Seattle.”

Jealous – “Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?”

Lonely –“You don’t have any friends,” she said.

Psychological

Victim mentality/Helpless — “How long had I been in my present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay with it? (What were the options?)”

Pessimistic “But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.”

Detached: My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged. (5

FRAMEWORK #2

Gary Smith, the sportswriter best known for his lengthy human interest stories in Sports Illustrated, is the source of the second framework.

To achieve a deep understanding of the athletes he was profiling, Smith would often look for the “central conflict to their lives and a daily manifestation of that conflict. Find the central conflict, find its daily manifestation,” he would say, “and it draws you closer to that person’s soul.”

It weds the actions of a character to a deep understanding of his or her intentions and fears.

This framework led to the best lesson in class last week. As my students reviewed Part II of Mudbound, they worked in groups, listing the actions of the novel’s main characters. In essence, I was calling attention to their daily manifestations.

Once we had a comprehensive list of what each character did in Part II of Mudbound, we glimpsed into their soul. We did this by developing central conflict statements that revealed a sophisticated understanding of each character’s fears, motivations, and latent desires.