Peter Turchi: Glimpsed in Twilight – Unresolved Characterization (July 2005)

Fiction writers often expend much effort trying to define characters or bring them into focus, Peter Turchi notes; in this lecture, he urges writers to move beyond this aim, and develop characters that are strategically unresolved. Turchi looks at drawings by Charles Ritchie and at fiction by Salter, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, O’Connor, Carver, Greene, Maxwell, Melville and Conrad to examine some such unresolved characters and how their complexity and contradiction lend richness and tension to the stories they inhabit.