A literary personage is neither the psychological outcome of an eery aery fluke, which may be termed “fiction”, nor bread swelled by merely leavening dough with the sour sweat of our foreshadowing brows, which can be named “mimesis”. Writers of the world, we’ve a bunch of easy techniques to hoist plausible personages. In my sight, for instance, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies has been a top-notch well of aesthetic wisdom. Furthermore, it contains, in a buttonholing way, some well wrought literary tricks.
