Critical thinking is fixed in the federal state educational standard of basic general education as a meta-subject result, yet in the literature lesson its formation is often replaced by the reproduction of ready-made characterizations of personages, in which the schoolchild does not arrive at an independent judgment about the hero. The discrepancy between the normative requirement and the established practice of interpretation constitutes the initial problem. The aim is to determine which interpretive actions upon the image of a literary hero correspond to operations of critical thinking and by which normative requirements this correspondence is secured. Conceptual-categorial and comparative analysis, classification, the structural-functional approach, modelling and content analysis of the current educational documents are applied. A typology is proposed that matches six operations of critical thinking with interpretive actions upon the hero image; methodical approaches are differentiated by their dominant cognitive function and the character of typical reduction; a matrix of correspondence between cognitive universal learning actions and interpretive means is constructed, together with a four-level model of image interpretation with observable signs of critical thinking. Correlating the levels with the standard shows that critical thinking develops not as an isolated technique applied to the text from outside but as a built-in side of the very work of construing character: the transition from the reproductive level to the productive-dialogical one is achieved by reconfiguring the interpretive task rather than by introducing a separate training of mental operations.