The 'Turn' in the Character

If we can grasp the rather strange idea that characters in fiction are not ‘people’ at all, but constructs, almost mechanical in nature, then we can see a kind of genealogy of character, or a relationship between them as constructs.

The protagonist is the starting point: he or she is often born into the beginning of a story, commonly lacking a support structure, a parent or standard family environment as part of being a manufactured entity composed mainly of missing elements. Protagonists lack things -and then they lack more and more things, and greater and greater things, until the climax of a story is defined by a threatened ultimate loss, usually their lives. In the majority of stories, the crux of the matter is the ‘turn’ in the tale whereby the hero or heroine is rescued at the very last moment; in a minority of fiction, such as occurs in Tragedies or Ironies, this motion is frustrated and Macbeth, Othello, Lear and Hamlet, for example, all die.