character element and characterization in the short stories of “alavasef” book gibran khalil gibran

abstract the character element, as the main construction fund of every story, plays a significant role in the procedure of processing the plot, shaping the events and moving forward in any narrative text. the book of “al-avasef” written by gibran contains some short stories in which the author considers and cares about character element and methods of its processing. in the present study, with the aim of identifying the ability of gibran in processing of fictional characters and on the basis of descriptive–analytical method, the definitions and classifications of character have firstly been presented and in the following, stories of this collection have been analyzed in the two realm of character types (static, dynamic, comprehensive and simple) and characterization methods (direct and indirect description: act, action, dialogue and name). the results of this research indicate that the most of the characters in this collection are of static and simple type, and among the charact erization methods, the dialogue and direct description have the most frequency in comparison with the other methods.