When Hemingway said this, he was rejecting artifice in fiction. To him, a “character” was something constructed to serve a plot, while a living person carried contradiction, silence, and an inner life that extended beyond the page. He believed people in a novel should feel as though they existed before the story begins and would continue after it ends, revealed not through explanation but through behavior, choice, and restraint. This idea is inseparable from his iceberg theory. Hemingway knew hi