Contribution to the problem of verbal presentation of a character

Abstract

Prose text, cathegories which contemporary theories of literature deal mostly with are the cathegories of narrator and narration in general. Any attempt to illuminate the relation between story and its discourse, canalizes the problem of prose art in one direction, neglecting thus (he problem of verbalization of a character. Comparing Proust’s novel to the one of V. Woolf not only difference in prose styles becomes evident (in spite of similarities emphasized often by theoreticians), but inadequacy as well of reduction of a hero merely to a narrative function. That’s why it is impossible to equate the mimesis of reality as a whole with the mimesis of a character. And maybe it would be possible to analyse the development of a novel considering the ways of rendering characters in different prose styles.