what is the difference between round and flat characters

Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, ostensibly changes as a result of his father returning home - we hear people say often enough that it’s time for him to man up - but he’s still making careless mistakes, and he stills needs to be saved by his father at the end of the epic. Think about the Christians’ Christ, for example, and you will be hard-pressed to argue that he changes in any way over the course of his narrative: he is a peacenik preacher as a child, and he is still a peacenik preacher even while being crucified. Lear and Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello severely modify themselves not only by their actions, but by their utterances, and most of all through overhearing themselves, whether they speak to themselves or to others. Jacob and Achilles unfold before us, but without metamorphoses.

They age within their stories, but their habitual modes of being do not develop. Remarkable as the Bible and Homer are at representing personages, their characters are relatively unchanging. Shakespeare seems to have created the dynamic character, for as Harold Bloom notes in his introduction to his Major Literary Characters series: The former refers to characters who change in some way over the course of a narrative, while the latter refers to characters who remain the same. The terms “dynamic character” and “static character” apparently predate Forster, and they refer to altogether different types of personages. Flat characters may have single personality traits, but they needn’t be uninteresting: take, for instance, Romeo and Juliet‘s Mercutio - a character remembered only for his bawdy commentary on life - who is entirely absorbing, but entirely flat in terms of characterization. The main characters of narratives are generally round - Dickens’s Pip springs readily to mind - though this is by no means a prerequisite. Forster points out that both types of characters are essential to any narrative, and I tend to agree with him - if all literature consisted of only round characters, then every novel would read like War and Peace.

Forster in his lecture, Aspects of the Novel (1927), refer to characters with multiple, often contradictory personality traits and those with a single character trait. Q: “What is the difference between a ’round character’ and a ‘dynamic character’?”Ī: The terms “round character” and “flat character,” first coined by British novelist E.M.

What is the difference between round and flat characters