This article examines the principal artistic and psychological techniques employed by Western literary scholars and authors to portray adolescent characters in fiction. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from narratology, developmental psychology, and cultural studies, the study investigates how interior monologue, free indirect discourse, unreliable narration, and the Bildungsroman tradition collectively shape adolescent subjectivity in canonical and contemporary Western literature. Through a mixed-methods approach encompassing close reading of ten representative texts and corpus-based content analysis of eighty-seven peer-reviewed critical articles, four dominant principles emerge: psychological realism, identity formation through social conflict, trauma-informed narration, and the symbolic use of spatial and relational settings. The findings suggest that Western literary criticism has progressively privileged an interior, psychologically layered model of adolescent characterisation since the mid-twentieth century, with growing attention to gender, race, and intersectionality in recent decades. Implications for comparative literary pedagogy and cross-cultural analysis of youth fiction are discussed.

Adolescent character, psychological realism, Bildungsroman

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