Contrasting Characters: Study Guide (English Literature 4.1)

This guide shows you how to explain what a pair of contrasting characters is doing in a short story. The reading skill is the same on every exam passage: notice a difference between two characters, say what each one stands for, and say what the story gains from putting them side by side. Public-domain extracts are quoted with author, title and year; the unseen-style passage is original and labelled as written by Marlbridge.

Why writers contrast characters

A story is a small world with a problem in it. The problem usually exists because two things want incompatible outcomes. Writers often give each of those things a human face. One character wants to keep a rule; another needs it bent. One character believes in duty; another in escape. Put the two in the same room and the reader can see, in action, an argument that would otherwise have to be stated as an idea.

That is why a contrast is more than a list of differences. Two characters can differ in height, accent and hobbies without any contrast mattering. A contrast matters when the difference is one of values: what each character treats as most important, and what each is willing to give up for it. Values are what make events happen. A character’s choices, in speech, action and inaction, show what they value, and when two value systems collide the result is conflict.

Three terms are worth being exact about:

• The protagonist is the main character, the one whose situation and choices the story follows most closely.
• The antagonist is whatever opposes the protagonist. It may be another character, but it may also be the protagonist’s own internal conflict, a collective such as a society or a family, or nature.
• Contrasting characters are two (or more) characters set against each other so that the differences between them become visible and meaningful. A protagonist and antagonist often contrast, but so can a protagonist and a friend, or two minor characters.

Notice what the definition of antagonist does and does not say. It does not say “villain”. An antagonist can be kind, reasonable, even loved, and still be the thing that stands in the protagonist’s way. Keep “who opposes?” separate from “who is good?”.

A method: detail, difference, value, effect

When a question asks about contrasting characters, work through four steps. Each step is one short sentence in your notes; together they become a paragraph.

1. Detail. Find a specific action, line of speech, gesture or description for each character. Prefer details that show a choice.
2. Difference. State the difference as precisely as you can: “one follows the printed rule; the other appeals to an urgent need”.
3. Value. Turn the difference into something each character stands for: order versus compassion, restraint versus freedom, appearance versus truth.
4. Effect. Say what the contrast does for the story: it creates the central conflict, exposes the cost of one value, prepares a change in a character, or sharpens a theme.

Most weak responses stop at step 2. They tell the reader that Character A is calm and Character B is anxious. The marks, and the insight, live in steps 3 and 4.

Worked example 1: a contrast in an original passage

The passage below was written by Marlbridge for practice. Read it, then follow the method.

By twenty to six the harbour office had emptied, but Mr Okafor was still stamping the day’s ledgers, one page at a time, as if the stamp could keep the hour from moving. He had not been late in thirty-one years. He had not been early either; he regarded early as a sort of boasting.

Tamsin pushed through the door without knocking, her coat buttoned wrongly and a cello case banging against the frame. “The six o’clock,” she said. “I know it’s gone. I know the gate closes at the quarter.”

“The gate closes at the quarter,” he agreed, and lowered the stamp. “The rule is printed on the board beside you.”

“My brother is ill,” she said, “and I do not have a printed board for that.” She laughed, a short unsteady laugh, and set the case upright between them like a third person. “I’ll stand here, then. Until the next boat.”

Mr Okafor looked at the case, and at the clock, and at the ledger with its last unstamped page. Then he reached under the counter for the key to the gate.

Step 1, detail. Mr Okafor stamps ledgers “as if the stamp could keep the hour from moving”; he quotes the rule back to her (“The rule is printed on the board”). Tamsin bursts in “without knocking”, her coat “buttoned wrongly”, and answers the rule with a human need: “My brother is ill”.

Step 2, difference. He answers with a fixed procedure; she answers with an emergency. His first reply repeats her own words back to her, so he is not arguing, only confirming the rule. She does not argue with the rule either; she changes what the conversation is about.

Step 3, value. Mr Okafor stands for order and predictability. The detail that he regards early arrival “as a sort of boasting” shows that his code is moral, not just practical: punctuality is his idea of decency. Tamsin stands for loyalty to a person over loyalty to a procedure.

Step 4, effect. The contrast creates the passage’s conflict, and the final sentence shows that the conflict is not settled by winning. He “reached under the counter for the key”. The reader is invited to see that his value system can bend without breaking, because the pause before he acts (“looked at the case, and at the clock, and at the ledger”) shows him weighing the two goods. The contrast therefore does more than oppose the two; it prepares a change in the man who seemed unchangeable.

A model paragraph. Marlbridge’s passage sets Mr Okafor’s devotion to procedure against Tamsin’s devotion to her brother in order to show that a rule can be honoured by the person who finally breaks it. His ledger-stamping, “as if the stamp could keep the hour from moving”, presents order as a kind of faith, while Tamsin’s wrongly buttoned coat and cello case show a person for whom there is no time to be orderly. Because he answers her appeal by reaching “for the key”, the contrast ends not in victory for either value but in a recognition that compassion has a claim on even the most exact mind.

Notice the shape of that paragraph: a claim about function first, then details from both characters, then an explanation of what the ending adds.

Worked example 2: a character against a force, not a person

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894) shows that the antagonist need not be a person who acts against the protagonist. Mrs Mallard has just been told that her husband has died. In her room she begins to whisper “free, free, free!” and, a little later, the narrator tells us that “she had loved him — sometimes. Often she had not.”

Meanwhile her sister Josephine is outside the door, “imploring for admission”: “Louise, open the door! I beg, open the door — you will make yourself ill.”

Step 1, detail. Louise, alone, repeats the word “free”; Josephine, at the keyhole, begs her to open the door because she believes grief is making her ill.

Step 2, difference. Josephine reads the closed door as a sign of suffering and wants to comfort. Louise is experiencing something the sister cannot imagine, a “monstrous joy”.

Step 3, value. Josephine stands for the conventional expectation of grief and the safety of company. Louise’s inner life stands for self-possession. The story names what she is freed from: “powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature”. That phrase does not accuse her husband in particular (the narrator says his hands were “kind, tender” and his face had “never looked save with love upon her”); it names the pressure of the institution of marriage and of expectation itself.

Step 4, effect. The contrast between sister and widow gives readers two ways to read the same door: as grief or as liberation. It places Louise’s real antagonist in the collective expectations around her, and it makes the final turn (her husband walks in alive, and she dies) bitterly consistent: the force opposing her has not been a villain but a way of living she cannot escape.

A short response that earns full credit for this contrast might say: Chopin contrasts Josephine’s conventional concern with Louise’s secret exhilaration to show that the protagonist’s real opponent is not a person but the social expectation that a wife’s life belongs to someone else.

Common misconceptions

• “Contrast means one character is good and the other is bad.” A good contrast often places two defensible values against each other: duty and compassion, restraint and freedom. Judging who is right can distract from what the contrast shows.
• “The antagonist must be a person.” The antagonist can be a society, nature or the protagonist’s own conflict. Naming the right kind of opposition is often the key to a question.
• “Describing both characters is analysis.” Two separate character sketches are not a contrast. You must connect them: say where they differ and what that difference does.
• “Contrasting characters must be in the same scene.” They can be linked across scenes, or one can be absent. A remembered person can contrast with a present one.
• “A contrast is always fixed.” Characters can move. In Marlbridge’s ferry passage the apparent opposite of Tamsin makes a choice that brings the two closer. Watch for the moment the contrast softens, intensifies or reverses.
• “The strongest evidence is the longest quotation.” A short phrase that shows a value (“as if the stamp could keep the hour from moving”) usually works better than a block of text.

Where this leads

Contrast is the first step toward the question of how characters relate to each other with nuance, which is Topic 4.2 (study guide). Test yourself now with the practice questions, keep the revision notes beside you, and tick off the checklist. Contrast also returns in Topic 4.4, where contrasts help shape the plot, and in the thesis and commentary topics at the end of the unit.