Abstract
In real life, what we do is supposed to reflect our personality. What we are - to the others - is first and foremost what we do and what we look like : we are judged by the others through the prism of our physical appearance and of our own behavior. Doing something "reprehensible" according to "them" means we'll end up labeled because of the precise act we just committed, impacting on the relationship we'll then keep with these people. By stating, in one of his Journals, that "action is character" F. Scott Fitzgerald, seems to imply that in literature too, what the characters in a book do, reveal who they are. But is that true? Can we generalize and apply to literature a truth valid in "real life"? We'll see that it can be tempting to conclude that Fitzgerald has a point, since it seems quite obvious that in books action is character. We'll then go back more seriously on the implications of such a conclusion.
