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A fictional character is any person who appears in a work of fiction, and is not a real-life figure. More accurately, a fictional character is the person or conscious entity we imagine to exist within the world of such a work. more...

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In addition to people, characters can be aliens, animals, gods, an artificial intelligence or, occasionally, inanimate objects. Characters are almost always at the center of fictional texts, especially novels and plays. It is, in fact, hard to imagine a novel or play without characters, though such texts have been attempted (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the most famous examples). In poetry, there is almost always some sort of person present, but often only in the form of a narrator or an imagined listener.

In various forms of theatre, performance arts and cinema (except for animation and CGI films), fictional characters are performed by actors, dancers and singers. In animations and puppetry, they are voiced by voice actors, though there have been several examples, particularly, in machinima, where characters are voiced by computer generated voices.

The process of creating and describing characters in a work of fiction is called characterization.

The opposite of a fictional character is a nonfictional character.

Names of characters

The names of fictional characters are often quite important. The conventions of naming have changed over time. In many Restoration comedies, for example, characters are given emblematic names that sound nothing like real life names: "Sir Fidget", "Mr. Pinchwife" and "Mrs. Squeamish" are some typical examples (all from The Country Wife by William Wycherley). Some 18th and 19th century texts, on the other hand, represent characters' names by the use of a single letter and a long dash (this convention is also used for other proper nouns, such as place names). This has the effect of suggesting that the author had a real person in mind but omitted the full name for propriety's sake. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo uses this technique. A similar technique was employed by Ian Fleming in his 20th Century James Bond novels, where the real name for M, if spoken in dialogue, was always written "Adm. Sir M***

Some ways of classifying characters

The following are some ways in which readers sometimes classify characters.

Round vs. flat

Round characters are those characters who are most complex and realistic; they represent a depth of personality which is imitative of life. They frequently possess both good and bad traits, and they may react unexpectedly or become entangled in their own interior conflicts.

Protagonists are normally round characters, though notable exceptions (such as Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron) exist. Antagonists are often round as well, though comedic villains may be almost farcically flat. Examples of round characters from various genres include Humbert Humbert of Nabokov’s Lolita, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler of Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Vladimir Taltos of Brust’s series of novels, Frodo Baggins of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Magneto of the X-Men comics and films, and Syaoran of CLAMP’s Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.

Read more at Wikipedia.org