"Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people"
About this Quote
Cornelia Funke, the German storyteller behind the Inkheart trilogy, speaks to a truth many lifelong readers recognize: characters can feel not only vivid, but somehow more fully known than the people around us. Fiction offers a rare intimacy. We are invited under the skin of a character, into their private doubts and desires, into the whys that shape their choices. Real life gives us behavior; fiction gives us inner weather. That access creates an illusion of completeness, a sense that we have met a whole person rather than a collection of glimpses.
Writers amplify this effect through selection. A character is crafted from telling details, patterns, and arcs that reveal motives with satisfying clarity. In ordinary life, we meet people at the wrong moments, misunderstand them, encounter contradictions without resolution. Narrative resolves some of that noise. Hours spent in a novel sustain an attention that daily interactions rarely permit, so the bonds we form with fictional companions can feel steadier than the fragile links of hurried conversation.
Funke’s own work plays with the boundary between page and world; in Inkheart, characters literally step out of books. The line nods to that fantasia, yet it is grounded in psychology. Immersive reading transports us, and our brains simulate experience so intensely that the emotions are genuine. These parasocial relationships endure because characters do not move away, change the subject, or contradict their established cores unless the story asks them to. We return to them and find them waiting, unchanged yet newly meaningful, as we bring different selves to each reread.
Calling characters more real is not a dismissal of life but a claim about honesty. Fiction distills truths we cannot always face directly and gives us practice in empathy. The paradox is that the artifice of story can leave us better equipped to see the complexity in actual people, and to grant them the interiority we so readily grant those we meet on the page.
Writers amplify this effect through selection. A character is crafted from telling details, patterns, and arcs that reveal motives with satisfying clarity. In ordinary life, we meet people at the wrong moments, misunderstand them, encounter contradictions without resolution. Narrative resolves some of that noise. Hours spent in a novel sustain an attention that daily interactions rarely permit, so the bonds we form with fictional companions can feel steadier than the fragile links of hurried conversation.
Funke’s own work plays with the boundary between page and world; in Inkheart, characters literally step out of books. The line nods to that fantasia, yet it is grounded in psychology. Immersive reading transports us, and our brains simulate experience so intensely that the emotions are genuine. These parasocial relationships endure because characters do not move away, change the subject, or contradict their established cores unless the story asks them to. We return to them and find them waiting, unchanged yet newly meaningful, as we bring different selves to each reread.
Calling characters more real is not a dismissal of life but a claim about honesty. Fiction distills truths we cannot always face directly and gives us practice in empathy. The paradox is that the artifice of story can leave us better equipped to see the complexity in actual people, and to grant them the interiority we so readily grant those we meet on the page.
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| Topic | Book |
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