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only a hero or heroine, but great? Indeed, what is greatness? Defining the term is difficult, because it is many different things to many different people.
    Perhaps, though, we might agree on one effect of greatness: impact. Great people do not leave the world unchanged. Great characters similarly stir readers and stay with them. Is it possible to construct this effect? How?
    It's tricky. Fiction has little impact when it is timid, cliche ridden, uneventful, and formulaic. The same is true of characters. Stereotypes have little impact. They fail to engage us because we don't believe in them. Great characters are especially prone to this problem. If you create someone who is made of goodness, lives by high principles, performs actions of high valor, and is pretty
    much perfect, then your readers' reaction is likely to be a sneering
    yeah, right!
    Fortunately, you don't have to create a paragon in order to conjure greatness. An aura of greatness comes foremost not from who a given character may be, but from the profound impact that character has on others. It is not strictly necessary for a character to have done anything at all for their effect on others to be apparent.
    Ethan Canin's novel America America (2008) is about a 1970s working-class young man, Corey Sifter, who gets a job as a lawn boy for the rich Metarey family in his upstate New York town. Corey becomes a de facto (though not wholly equal) member of the family. Family patriarch Liam Metarey pays for Corey's education and obtains for him a position as aide to Senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
    Canin opens his novel many years later at Bonwiller's funeral. From the first lines it is clear that Bonwiller has had an enormous impact on Corey's life:
    When you've been involved in something like this, no matter how long ago it happened, no matter how long it's been absent from the news, you're fated, nonetheless, to always search it out. To be on alert for it, somehow, every day of your life. For the small item at the back of the newspaper. For the stranger at the cocktail party or the unfamiliar letter in the mailbox. For the reckoning pause on the other end of the phone line. For the dreadful reappearance of something that, in all likelihood, is never going to return.
    At this point in the novel we know nothing about Bonwiller, Corey or what will happen. All we know is that it was "something like this," which is to say something big, newsworthy and possibly even historic. The after-effects have followed Corey through his life, leaving him alert for echoes.
    Bonwiller's funeral is attended by crowds of bigwigs, reinforcing his importance. Corey by this point publishes a respected independentnewspaper but chooses not to cover the event himself because, "I was at the funeral for my own reasons." Later in the day, when the crowds are gone, Corey returns to the freshly mounded grave. Regarding it, he reflects:
    That was it. The quiet end of it all.
    There was no one else alive now who knew.
    Knew what? There are secrets, obviously; powerful ones worth keeping. It is many pages before we learn what they are. Was the Senator a leader or a rogue or both? Canin hasn't shown us: All he needs at this point is to reveal the impact Bonwiller has had. Greatness already is in the air.
    Thirteen Moons (2006) is Charles Frazier's second novel, following Cold Mountain (1997). It's the story of a great man, Will Cooper, whose life spans almost the entire nineteenth century. As in Canin's novel, Frazier frames his subject's story. At the turn of the twentieth century, elderly Will Cooper is waiting to die. Notice how Frazier weaves strength into his narrator's final days:
    There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We're called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and