Literature is not only food for brain but also for soul. Literature shows you the world which never existed but you still connect with it. It will let you meet your inner self, the self you always hide from the real world. Literature will give you the feel of your existence by the fictional characters that are never existed.
Each piece of literature or novel has so many fictional characters that resembles with your personality. Those fictional characters’ lifestyle, desires, problems and its solutions, disputes and almost everything are relatable to you. Even though the book was published hundred years before you born, you might think that author had observed you and your life and portrayed directly to the novel without your knowledge.
Here are few of those fictional characters from fictional world which I think we all can relate with.
The primary duty of literature is to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed -Stephen King
Holden Caulfield from “The Catcher in the Rye” by J D Salinger
Holden is naive and at the same time resentful of the adult world. One of Holden’s most striking and quintessential qualities is his powerful revulsion for “phony” qualities, a catch-all term for the perceived hypocrisy that irritates Holden. It is this cynicism that causes him to distance himself from other people, despite wanting connection as well. Holden is very much a character of contradiction; at seventeen years of age he is six feet two-and-a-half inches (189 cm) tall, and already has some grey hair – though he himself admits that he sometimes acts more like a 13-year-old than an adult. He continually fails classes. Holden is one of the best fictional characters that resides in almost all teenager.
Charlie from “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky
Charlie from “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky: ‘So this is my life. And I want you to know that I’m both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.’ Charlie, lives in his own little world, through his tainted glasses he tells us the thing we always knew but did not understand. Charlie is awkward, clumsy, angry and sad. Charlie is all of us.
Jane Eyre from “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte
Orphaned as a baby, she struggles through her nearly loveless childhood and becomes governess at Thornfield Hall. Jane is passionate and strongly principled, and values freedom and independence. She also has a strong conscience.
Scarlett O’Hara from “Gone With The Wind” by Margaret Mitchell
The protagonist of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett is a dark-haired, green-eyed Georgia belle who struggles through the hardships of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Scarlett exhibits more of her father’s hard-headedness than her mother’s refined Southern manners. Although initially she tries to behave prettily, her instincts rise up against social restrictions.
Determination defines Scarlett and drives her to achieve everything she desires by any means necessary. This determination first manifests itself in her narcissistic and sometimes backstabbing efforts to excite the admiration of every young man in the neighborhood. Later, under threat of starvation and even death, she is determined to survive and does so by picking cotton, running her entire plantation, forging a successful business, and even killing a man.
Toru from “Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami
Toru is a university student in Tokyo in the late 1960s. He’s smart but apathetic, drifting through life and having meaningless sex. He was closest with his high school best friend Kizuki and his longtime girlfriend Naoko, and Kizuki’s suicide comes as a blow. Things get complicated when his developing feelings for Naoko coincides with her own mental breakdown.
Ashima from “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri
Ashima from “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri: The most comfortable we are in is our homes, with our people. However, often, we have to step out of our comfortable surroundings and face the brazen world. So, when Ashima finds herself in a new land, she struggles with the politics of name and identity. She holds onto the sweet memories of past, clinging to it to face the reality.
Franny from “Franny and Zooey” by J.D. Salinger
Franny is having a nervous breakdown. She feels a sudden disgust for everyone at college: students, teachers, friends. Franny tries to figure out how to cope and how to act in a world of phonies.
Stephen Dedalus from “A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man” by James Joyce
Although the novel follows Stephen Dedalus’ life since he was born, his college years are very formative for his life as an artist. While at University College Dublin, he becomes increasingly angry toward school and politics. His parents are pushing him toward the church, and when Stephen tries to explain his alienation from the church to his friends, they don’t understand.
F. Scott Fitzgerald from “The Crack Up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald from “The Crack Up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald: There comes a point in life, when nothing makes sense, the walls you constructed to keep you secured from harm, comes down falling on you. F. Scott Fitzgerald finds himself in a similar position. In his essay “The Crack Up”, he pens down his feelings as a broken man, accepting the truth he could no longer run away from.
Bridget Jones from “Bridget Jones’s Diary” by Helen Fielding
Bridget Jones from “Bridget Jones’s Diary” by Helen Fielding: If you believe that, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces’, Bridget is the girl you can relate to. She’s every woman trying to manage a career, a love life, her health and failings from time to time.
Madeleine from “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides
This book starts on commencement weekend at Brown and follows Madeleine, whose senior thesis on the marriage plot in Victorian novels has started to mirror her life. Madeleine’s best friend Mitchell is in love with her, but she’s in love her brooding, unstable boyfriend Leonard, and she has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
Amory Blaine from “This Side of Paradise” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory Blaine is a privileged Princeton student with a talent for writing. But after he graduates, he goes through a succession of empty relationships and becomes disillusioned. You may find that Amory’s Lost Generation problems aren’t such a far cry from your life in college.
If you know certain fictional characters from literature, please comment below the name of the character with the Book from which it belongs and how you relate with that character.
