Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Sensible Man

Tagged: Theme.

A recurring character type who (often as viewpoint character) comfortingly embodies rationality and common sense – but may therefore attract some irony when uncommon sense rules. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes sequence is a determined Sensible Man, steadfast but unable to follow Holmes's leaps of genius. The Sensible Man hero of Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is guyed and disgraced by anarchic forces of Faerie, but wins through by doggedly insisting on what is right, even to the brink of death. In Duo sequences like Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the Sensible Man role can alternate as one partner balances the other's feyness or excess; Club-Story narrators like Lord Dunsany's Jorkens affect a stolid Sensible Man persona as ballast for their outrageous Tall Tales. The eponymous Sensible Man in Joanna Russ's "The Man Who Could Not See Devils" (1970) has no Perception of and thus no vulnerability to omnipresent Demons and Ghosts – a harbinger of Thinning. Stephen Donaldson's Covenant in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is a kind of Parody of the Sensible Man, forced by the rules of his own existence into a shocking rejection of the Secondary World's very reality. [DRL]