Section 3 Summary and Analysis

"People, Part 1" Forster begins this lecture with a point related to the two different experiences of life: the order of events and the value of those events. He suggests that the characters in a novel embody, represent and dramatize the value of the story the novelist is telling. After making witty comments about how novelists write about people rather than animals, about how there is an automatic affinity between the novelist and his characters because the novelist too is a human being, and about how characters are in literal fact nothing more than carefully chosen clusters of words, Forster introduces the main focus of this lecture. This is his contention that people in books are markedly different from people in life.

Forster supports this contention in several ways. Firstly, he says the difference between history/memoir and fiction, or the study...