Narratology

The sixteenth entry is la caractérisation, and the English noun standing behind it covers two French ones that never change places. Le personnage is the figure in a book or a play — le personnage principal, un personnage secondaire — and it is what la caractérisation builds. Le caractère is what a living person is like: elle a un caractère difficile, un homme de caractère. So le caractère du personnage is not saying the same thing twice; it names the temperament a book has given its figure. Two consequences follow for a reader coming from English. The first is that « the characters of the novel », carried across word for word, gives les caractères du roman, which in a printing house means the typefaces it was set in, since un caractère is also a letter of type. The second runs the other way: « a real character » is un sacré personnage, and « that is out of character » is cela ne lui ressemble pas. One noun on our side, and not one of those phrases keeps it.