MCAT Practice Test 12

Passage 5

¹Readers of novels are trained, early and often, to follow the protagonist. We ask what she wants, what stands in her way, how she changes; the other figures in the book are sorted by their usefulness to that inquiry, as obstacles, mirrors, or confidants. Criticism has largely ratified this habit. A minor character, in the usual account, is a function rather than a person: a device for revealing the hero, advancing the plot, or supplying a texture of social life against which the central drama can stand out. To ask what such a figure wants, on this view, is to mistake the scaffolding for the building.

²There is something to be said for this account. Novels are finite, and a writer who lavished equal attention on every servant and passerby would produce not a richer book but an unreadable one. Selection is the condition of narrative. The novelist's decision to grant one consciousness depth and leave another in outline is not a failure of sympathy; it is the very act by which a story comes to have a shape.

³But the functional account mistakes how minor characters actually behave on the page. The most memorable of them seem to exceed their assignments. A housekeeper glimpsed in three scenes, a cousin who speaks a dozen lines, a clerk whose single complaint the narrator reports and then forgets—such figures often linger in a reader's mind long after the protagonist's crises have blurred. They linger, I suspect, precisely because the novel gives us so little of them. A flicker of an independent life, shown and then withdrawn, invites us to imagine the whole that the book declines to supply.

⁴This effect is not incidental. Many novels gain their moral seriousness from the pressure that these partial lives exert on the central story. When a heroine's triumph depends on a servant's labor that the narrative barely registers, or when a family's tragedy is witnessed by a neighbor who has troubles of her own, the reader is made aware of the cost of the novel's own focus. The book, in effect, confesses the limits of its attention, and that confession is one of the ways a novel can be honest about a world in which most people are, to most other people, minor.

⁵To read in this way is not to demand that novels become democracies of equal attention, an ideal that would dissolve narrative altogether. Nor is it to claim that every walk-on part conceals a hidden masterpiece; many minor characters are exactly the functions the usual account describes, and nothing is gained by pretending otherwise. It is rather to notice that the asymmetry between major and minor characters is itself a subject the novel can explore—and that the finest novels often explore it deliberately, letting the edges of their canvas remind us of everything the center leaves out. The reader who attends only to the protagonist reads the story the novel tells; the reader who attends to the margins reads, as well, the story of what that telling costs.