When we talk about flat characters and round characters, what we mean is that there is
a difference — or some kind of distinction — between characters who are superficial,
predictable, or otherwise not very sophisticated — we usually call these characters flat
— and, on the other hand, round characters: characters that have a certain kind of depth
or complexity.
And the question is: What exactly is this depth?
What makes a round character more interesting or more complex?
If we look at a very famous narrative — let’s take for example the very first Star Wars
movie — Episode 4, A New Hope, 1977 — we can see that Luke Skywalker, for example,
is a good character.
How do we know that he’s good?
He has blue eyes, he has blond hair, he wears white — we can talk about that when we talk
about symbolism ¬— as opposed to Darth Vader, who is a bad character.
How do we know he’s bad?
He’s dressed in black, of course.
Which is very predictable and very superficial.
How do we know that Obi-Wan Kenobi is a good character?
He has white hair and a white beard, he looks like a religious figure — like a monk, or
someone who is pure, etc.
What I would like to suggest is that these characters are flat characters.
Not that they’re not interesting.
I think it’s a fascinating narrative with captivating and memorable characters.
I’ve watched it many times.
But I have to admit that there is not a lot of depth to these characters — in the sense
that they are, for the most part, stable.
They are rarely confused, and their behavior doesn’t confuse us.
It’s true that Luke Skywalker — at the beginning ¬— is reluctant to join the rebellion.
But once he does, that’s it.
He’s committed to the cause.
He never has second thoughts, he’s completely dependable, he never does anything that is
selfish or shocking or controversial or uncharacteristic.
He’s entirely good.
I think that when we talk about round characters, we’re ultimately talking about characters
who defy the whole idea of moral dichotomies.
In other words, round characters cannot be referred to in terms of good or bad — or
good and evil — or right and wrong.
So if we take, for example, a more complex narrative — Wise Blood, a famous American
novel by Flannery O’Connor — we can see a set of characters that are much more complicated
than the superficial distinction between ¬— or division into — good and bad.
The main character, Hazel Motes, is a young man who is an anti-preacher: he is against
religion, he hates God, he hates Jesus, and he starts — or he founds — his own church:
the Church Without Christ.
Paradoxically, he is completely devoted to the Church Without Christ; he has a lot of
faith in the Church Without Christ; he’s an absolute believer in the truth of Church
Without Christ — which means that he’s a very honest, very sincere, very serious
person.
When he’s confronted by frauds — people who pretend to be representing God but are
actually in the religion business to make money — he kills one of them.
In that sense, he plays the role of an angry biblical prophet — Elijah, for example.
He’s violent, he’s self-tortured, toward the end the novel he blinds himself — and
at the very end he’s willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and die — for the sake
of truth, for the sake of showing people that they are being deceived by fake preachers
and false prophets.
We could say that he really becomes a Christ figure.
And it’s very strange, because he’s not a very sympathetic character.
He's not a lovable character.
He’s not Luke Skywalker.
He’s controlled by rage, he’s a killer, he rejects the people who follow him — his
own disciples — and he ends up dead.
But that’s a round character.
Naturally, some characters in this novel are flat.
These are all the greedy people who pretend to be righteous while cheating everybody in
sight.
For example, the landlady, Mrs. Flood, a sweet old lonely woman who, I think, is a horrible
person and not so sweet at all.
She’s gluttonous and avaricious, and she doesn’t change throughout the novel, even
if she claims she does.
It’s interesting that we are often trained to look for depth when we examine literary
characters, and sometimes it’s hard for us to accept the fact that certain characters
remain flat in spite of our tendency to think about them in terms of growth, transformation,
epiphany, and so on.
I think that the point is that good fiction often presents a curious interplay of flat
characters and round characters, and it’s not always easy to tell which is which.