What is a Flat Character vs a Round Character? Extended Transcript
By Gilad Elbom
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. And Darth Vader, in spite of his respect for the Force, is completely committed to defending the Death Star.
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. He’s willing to die for the sake of saving the masses from their own blindness. 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.
Other round characters in this novel are his disciples. One of them is a nasty kind of guy — ugly, aggressive, a Peeping Tom who is often rude to people, and who is himself a target for — or a victim of — ridicule and abuse. He steals a museum artifact, he physically attacks an actor in a gorilla costume — then he puts it on and becomes a gorilla himself, and disappears into the wilderness — we never find out what happens to him at the end — but he’s the most honest, most loyal, most devoted disciple: he basically plays the role of Saint Peter.
Another disciple is a questionable young woman who works as a sidekick for a conman — she’s wild, she’s self-serving, she’s consumed by sexual urges — she’s a self-proclaimed sinner — but at the same time, she’s kind, compassionate, sensitive. Another 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.
Symbolism
Symbolism is the idea that things represent other things. What we mean by that is that we can look at something — let’s say, the color red— and conclude that it represents not the color red itself but something beyond it: for example, passion, or love, or devotion. Or maybe the opposite: infidelity. The color red can also represent blood. It can also mean stop — when you approach a traffic light. It can symbolize communism. Or: Native Americans. In other words, it can mean anything you want it to mean. In other words, it means everything. Or: it means nothing, because if you can assign any kind of symbolic interpretation to it, it has no internal value, no fixed or unchanging or universal meaning. It has no special quality that designates it as a symbol of one particular thing.
So the questions is: are there universal symbols that communicate agreed-upon concepts? We could talk, for example, about whitea symbol of purity or innocence or life. But again, that would be a very superficial reading of literature, because white could also signify paleness, bloodlessness, lifelessness — and death. So once again, if white can signify one thing and its opposite — life and death — what kind of symbol is it?
A more sophisticated way of approaching symbolism would be to say that things have symbolic qualities only in certain contexts — and sometimes they do not symbolize anything at all. If we want to quote Gertrude Stein: sometimes a rose is a rose is a rose. Sometimes a rose doesn’t mean love or courtship or passion or desire or devotion — or anything beyond itself. Some flowers happen to be red, others are white or blue, and they have no symbolic meaning, neither in real life nor in literature.
I think it’s very tempting to treat every element in literature as a symbolof something. For example, a storm brewing on the horizon must be a symbol of the emotional turmoil that the main character is going through; or, the black car that the main character drives is a foreshadowing of his death; and so on. It’s important to remember that sometimes a storm on the horizon simply represents bad weather. Some cats are white, some are black, some are ginger. That doesn’t mean that white cats are more innocent or pure, or that the owners of black cats are morbid characters who are going to die. We’re all going to die, and sooner than we think, unfortunately.
So where do we see symbols that are smarter, symbols that are more sophisticated, more complex? I think it all depends on the context, and I think that smart works of literature can establish certain textual elements as symbols that are not necessarily invested with any kind of predetermined meaning: elements that we don’t tend to think of automatically as symbols of anything.
Here’s an example. If we take this very interesting novel by Gilbert Sorrentino, Under the Shadow, what it does is it shows us a series of images — or textural elements, or textual components — and we have no idea what they mean or why they are repeated throughout the novel, again and again, in different configurations. But then when we look at one of these elements — let’s say, the moon — every time we see it, every time characters look at the moon, we realize, gradually, that they are actually looking back into their past, into their personal history, or childhood memories.
More specifically, at some point in the book, an amateur astronomer, who is a physician by profession, points a telescope at the moon, and when he looks through the lens, what he sees is a young couple, a man and a woman — or sometimes a young woman and an older woman — bathing in a lake. It’s very strange. He’s startled by this image. How it is possible that this is what he sees when the telescope is pointed at the moon? What we find out, later in the novel, is that he’s looking at his own parents, and all of a sudden he gains access to a repressed childhood memory. So the next time the moon appears, we know that it probably symbolizes — or somehow represents — a particular hidden layer in the psychological makeup of the character looking at the moon.
What it means is that the concept of identifying symbols in literature is not necessarily based on the idea of decoding — or replacing a familiar symbol with a designated meaning. The point is to examine textual elements in new contexts and attribute to them symbolic meanings that may have never existed before.