Q&A Question 2: Characters

How important to our emotional reactions to fiction are the specifics of the characters?

This question affords me to opportunity to explicate my proffered solution to the paradox of fiction that I attempted, poorly, to articulate on Wednesday. As my question suggests, I think we are too focused on the characters of a story. Mistake me not, the characters are important to our emotional reaction, but what is irrelevant is the fact that they do not exist.

If the leg of a real sea captain, a captain whom we know, is removed by a large white whale, we would react with a certain emotion. This event has a certain form to it: Person (P)who we care about (PC)is harmed (H) in a particular way. (I understand this is a drastic oversimplification but it shall suffice for our purposes.) It is this concept that we are reacting to; (PC) is (H) and to this there is a corresponding emotional reaction. Nota Bene: if it was not someone we cared about, but rather merely (P) is (H) then the reaction, and the concept, would be different.

When we read Moby Dick, we encounter Ahab (P) and because Melville writes it so, we begin to care about him (PC) and then he is harmed in a particular way (H) and so the form is the same: (PC) is (H). We react to the form of the concept, not to the reality of the characters.