The Significance of the Constructive Component of Character in Modern Narratives

Based on James Phelan's Triple Component Theory of Character, this article aims to reveal which of these triple components are more significant in the change of narratives from pre-modern to modern era. Since some of the significant differences between pre-modern and modern narratives is the priority change in plot and characterization, i.e, the latter becoming prior to the former, the narratology of the characters in these two genres of story can partly explain the reasons of such a change. The result of this study showed that in the modern characters, the Synthetic component becomes prior to the other two components i.e mimetic and Thematic; while the pre-modern characters – specially the characters in Realistic narratives- try to get as close as possible to their real human models in the real society. Thus, the most significant component in their being would be the Mimetic component. This is in contrast with the characters in modern narrative. Since the authors, here, are disappointed with the society, their characters deviate from the real characters of life and thus, their synthetic component becomes more prominent. The narratological case study of the present article is Malakout, a modern novel written by Bahram Sadeghi.