Types of characters in literature: the full list, with examples

The types of characters in literature fall into four groups. By role in the plot: protagonist, antagonist, deuteragonist, foil, confidant, mentor, love interest, sidekick, supporting and minor characters. By change: static or dynamic. By complexity: flat or round. And by pattern: stock characters and archetypes. One character can be described in all four ways at once. Elizabeth Bennet is the round, dynamic protagonist of Pride and Prejudice; Mr. Collins is a flat, static minor character who supplies comic relief.

Each group answers a different question, so the labels don't compete. The quickest way in is the table of one novel's whole cast, labeled four ways. After that, use the types to check a cast you've started rather than to build one from scratch.

Character types at a glance

One novel, every label

Here is the main cast of Pride and Prejudice (1813), labeled in all four groups. Each label is explained in the sections below.

Two things stand out. Only the two leads change, and the rest of the cast holds still around them, which is what makes their change visible. And only three characters are round. Austen spends depth on the people the reader follows and lets everyone else be instantly recognizable.

Character types by role

Roles describe the job a character does for the plot. One person can hold several, and a role can pass from one character to another as the story goes on.

Protagonist

The character whose goal drives the plot and whose choices the story follows: the MC, in writing-group shorthand. Usually, though not always, the viewpoint character. Jane Eyre narrates her own novel; Dr. Watson narrates most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but Holmes is the one solving the case.

Antagonist and villain

The antagonist is whoever or whatever stands in the protagonist's way. A villain is an antagonist with bad intent. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is an antagonist without being a villain: she opposes Darcy's marriage to Elizabeth because she wants him for her own daughter. Iago is a villain. “I hate the Moor,” he says in Act 1 of Othello, and spends the play destroying him. The antagonist can also be a force rather than a person: a society, nature, the protagonist's own fear. For building a human one, see how to write a villain, and for premises, the villain ideas list.

Anti-hero

A protagonist without the usual heroic virtues: courage, honesty, idealism. The title page of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) sums up its narrator as “Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief,” and readers have followed her with mixed feelings ever since. The anti-hero guide covers the types, from rogue to Byronic hero.

Tragic hero

A protagonist of stature brought down by an error or flaw of their own, what Aristotle called hamartia (“some error or frailty,” in S. H. Butcher's translation of the Poetics). Othello, Macbeth and King Lear are the standard cases. The tragic hero guide covers Aristotle's terms in full.

Deuteragonist and tritagonist

The second and third most important characters. The words come from Greek theater, where the protagonist, deuteragonist and tritagonist were the first, second and third actors, and Aristotle's Poetics credits Aeschylus with adding the second actor and Sophocles the third. In a novel the deuteragonist is usually the protagonist's partner, rival or love: Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Foil

A foil is a character whose contrast with another brings out that character's traits, usually by facing the same situation and choosing differently. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1811) are foils to each other: one hides her heartbreak, the other displays hers.

Confidant

The person the protagonist talks to, so the reader hears thoughts that would otherwise stay locked in narration. Jane Bennet hears Elizabeth's secrets in Pride and Prejudice. In Wuthering Heights (1847), Catherine tells the housekeeper Nelly Dean what she will tell no one else.

Mentor

The guide who teaches, equips or advises the protagonist, then usually leaves the stage. The briefest version is in Perrault's “Cinderella” (1697): the godmother “who was a fairy” turns a pumpkin into a coach, hands over the glass slippers, sets one rule, not to stay past midnight, and steps aside. The character archetypes guide covers the mentor alongside the other story roles, from herald to shadow.

Love interest

The character the protagonist falls for, and in a romance the second lead. A good one wants something of their own and has secrets of their own: Rochester's, revealed at the altar, drives the second half of Jane Eyre (1847). The romance novel guide covers writing two leads.

Sidekick

A loyal companion, often of lower status and often comic, whose common sense grounds the hero's ideals. Sam Weller is cleaning boots at the White Hart inn when Mr. Pickwick first meets him in The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), and once hired, his street sense supplies what his innocent master lacks.

Comic relief

A character, or a scene, that releases tension with laughter. In Hamlet, two gravediggers trade jokes while they dig Ophelia's grave, just before the prince picks up Yorick's skull. The laughter makes the grief around it sharper.

Supporting and minor characters

Supporting characters have scenes and wants of their own and affect the plot. Minor characters appear briefly with a single job. The two portly gentlemen collecting for charity in A Christmas Carol (1843) are minor, but Dickens brings one back on Christmas morning so Scrooge can make amends. The supporting characters guide covers sidekicks, mentors, confidants and comic relief in depth, with more examples.

Narrator

The voice telling the story. A first-person narrator can be the protagonist, like Jane Eyre, or a witness, like Ishmael in Moby-Dick (1851). Some books nest narrators: in Wuthering Heights, Lockwood writes down what Nelly Dean tells him, a frame story. A narrator the reader can't trust is an unreliable narrator. For the first-person kinds, see first-person narrative.

Static and dynamic characters

A static character ends the story as the same person. A dynamic one goes through a lasting inner change in what they believe, value or understand about themselves. Scrooge is dynamic. His nephew Fred, who goes on inviting him to Christmas dinner whatever he says, is static. Static isn't a fault: most of any cast is static, and a fixed character is what lets the reader see how far a dynamic one has moved. Examples and how to write each: static characters and dynamic characters.

Flat and round characters

These are E. M. Forster's terms, from Aspects of the Novel (1927). A flat character is “constructed round a single idea or quality” and can be summed up in a sentence. A round one is “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” Mrs. Bennet is flat; Elizabeth is round. Complexity and change are separate scales, so all four combinations exist: Mr. Bennet is round and static, the prodigal son in Luke's parable flat and dynamic. See flat vs round characters for Forster's own examples and a practice set, and round characters for how to write one.

Stock characters, archetypes and allegory

Stock characters are ready-made types an audience recognizes on sight. Roman comedy had the braggart soldier, the title character of Plautus's Miles Gloriosus. The Italian commedia dell'arte had masks such as Pantalone, the miserly old merchant, and Il Dottore, the pompous scholar. Later fiction added its own: the wicked stepmother, the mad scientist, the hard-boiled detective. A stock character turns into a stereotype when it's built from assumptions about a group of real people.

Archetypes are deeper patterns of motive, such as the Hero who must prove their worth or the Sage who must know the truth. The twelve archetypes each pair a desire with a fear. A stock character is a costume; an archetype is a motive, and many different costumes can fit it.

Allegorical characters stand for an idea, and are often named for it: Everyman in the late-medieval morality play, Christian in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678).

Pattern and role overlap rather than compete. Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey treats archetypes such as the mentor, the herald and the shadow as jobs a character does for the plot, sometimes for a single scene, which is why this page lists the mentor as a role. And one character can carry a role and one of the twelve archetypes at once: Perrault's fairy godmother is a mentor by role and a Magician by archetype, a figure whose power is to transform things.

Using character types on your draft

The types work best as a check on a cast you've already started, not as a recipe. A story doesn't need every role. It needs each role it has to be filled by someone who wants something. Run the list against your cast:

For a fuller sheet on each main character, the character profile template covers want, need, wound, voice and arc.

Once a draft exists, the Strokes Assistant can review it for two items on that list: characters who do the same job, and characters who vanish for ten chapters at a stretch.