Complexity from Contradiction
Private thoughts against professed values
- Inconsistencies between the private thoughts of characters and their actual behaviour reveal tensions and complexities between private and professed values.
- The CED's pair is precise: private values against professed ones.
- So the analysis is not "he is a hypocrite" but what the gap between the two is doing in the book.
The CED pairs private thoughts against...
The gap between private and professed is where the complexity lives.
Competing choices make a text complex
- A character's competing, conflicting or inconsistent choices or actions contribute to complexity in a text.
- Note the object: complexity in a text, not merely in a character.
- So one character's contradiction can make the whole book harder to settle.
Inconsistent choices contribute to complexity in the character only.
The CED says complexity in a text — one character's contradiction unsettles the whole book.
You need access to the private side
- This analysis is only available where the text gives you a character's thoughts.
- That is why it appears in the longer-fiction units: novels and plays supply soliloquy, interior narration, letters.
- Where you have no access, use professed values against actions instead — the same gap, read from outside.
Professed value, private thought, or a function?
Sort each element of a complexity analysis.
This analysis requires the text to give you...
Without access, use professed values against actions — the same gap from outside.
"He is a hypocrite" is a verdict, not an analysis. The objective asks for the function of the complexity — what the contradiction does for the text. A character whose private and professed values disagree may be the book's way of holding open a question it does not intend to answer.
The objective asks you to explain the ____ of those complexities.
Noticing the contradiction is the evidence; what it does is the analysis.
Then explain the function
- The objective asks you to explain the function of those complexities, not only to find them.
- A contradiction can make a character sympathetic, unreliable, or representative of a conflict the book cannot resolve.
- Which of those it does is the analysis; noticing the contradiction is the evidence.
Put the complexity pass in order.
The last step is the function; the first three are the evidence.
A complexity pass
- Quote a professed value. Quote a private thought or an action that contradicts it.
- Name the two values in tension, both in the character's own terms.
- Then say what the contradiction does for the book — its function, not its verdict.
He tells the family that debts must always be paid, and privately hopes his brother's will go unpaid. Professed: obligation. Private: he wants the brother diminished. Function: the novel can now examine whether duty and resentment are separable — a question it never answers, and does not need to.
Inconsistencies between private thoughts and actual behaviour reveal tensions between private and professed values, and competing or inconsistent choices contribute to complexity in a text — not only in a character. The objective asks for the function of the complexity, not a verdict on the character.