Character and the novel, as seen by Dostoevsky

Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky rarely steps aside to address the reader directly, and when he does it grabs your attention (well, everything D. does grabs your attention); a striking example of one of his rare addresses to the reader is the opening Part 4 (the last part) of "The Idiot," in which he begins by mentioning one of the characters, Varva, which had me going back to the list of characters at the opening of the novel (in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation) because I couldn't remember who she was - but Dostoevsky of course is one step ahead of us - he knows we don't remember this character, which leads him to a little aside on "ordinary" characters: he notes that writers tend to portray characters who are extraordinary in any of a variety of ways: their accomplishments, their extremes of behavior (for good or ill), the eccentricities, the exaggerated qualities - their the tallest, the most beautiful, the strongest, the ugliest, and so forth. This characterization is of course true in particular of Dostoevsky himself, who is always writing about extremes of character and behavior, but is generally true of much if not all fiction: few writers portray the ordinary, and why should they? Portraying an ordinary character - and D. mentions a few in his own novel, although I question whether Ganya/Gavra is truly ordinary, with his extreme passions for women who are out of his reach - you have to punch your weight, as Nick Hornby said in High Fidelity - is in face quite a challenge, as each descriptive tool in the arsenal, whether of appearance, statements, observations by, observations of, actions - gives the character some particularity and separates him or her from other characters in the novel, in literature, and in life. Going back to Austen for a moment: aren't most of her characters actually quite typical of their class and their time? But by the act of articulating them as characters, Austen makes the a-typical, makes them distinct unto to themselves. Characters in novels are in that sense always a-typical because we have access to their consciousness in ways that we never have access to the consciousness of another in life. That is, if we were to meet these, or many of these, characters, they would be indistinct; conversely, if we were to "read" any of thousands of people whom we meet or know or even encounter, each would be distinct and unique, a-typical. Of course through the late 19th century and into the 20th century, literature became increasingly concerned with the lives of ordinary people, though often under extraordinary circumstances - and this is especially true of drama, more than of fiction (think of the differences between classical tragedy, Shakespearean tragedy, and modern tragedy: from Oedipus to Lear to Willy Loman).