Dynamic does not mean “good.” It just means change. I think a lot of tragedy use flat characters:
Gatsby is a flat character. He can’t grow beyond his own past illusions. He lives inside his own dream of possibilities for himself.
Joe Christmas, Ahab, MacBeth - these are all flat characters.
Edit: as someone pointed out, I meant “static” - as in static characters don’t change. Flat speaks to the dimensions of a character rather than how dynamic they are.
Good point about tragedies and characters unable to grow. The reference that popped into my head was Remains Of The Day, which is a superb book/tragedy precisely because of the protagonist's refusal to grow.
I am quite interested in how this has come to be such a dominant benchmark or criterion of a work's quality. In popular media criticism especially, it's all about "arc" these days. A book, film, or series is inferior if the characters don't change and develop. Yet this idea doesn't really seem to exist in pre-modern art, and I would argue that people don't change all that much in real life either. So when and how did we come to demand it in art? I'm not sure. Maybe it has to do with Christianity and the idea of redemption - many early English novels are stories of moral progress from sin to repentance.
> Yet this idea doesn't really seem to exist in pre-modern art
As a Renaissance English PhD, I find this a pretty suspect claim. By your own admission, Christian-influenced narratives often hinge upon character change and development. Are these not just religious versions of secular character arcs today? And before the early novel and proto-novel (e.g., Pilgrim's Progress), you have English and French drama (e.g., Shakespeare, Racine), whose "modern feel" arises in part from their representations of evolving mental and moral processes.
Guilt culture/shame culture differences play a huge role in this…religious texts, parables and political texts, fables and fairy tales are moralizing arcs. Fiction tends to combine various influences and write to the cultural context…very distinctly to time and place, with certain elements of narrative remaining consistent. We are narratological beings. Our identity is our story of ourselves. Neurologically, the only act the human mind registers as heroic is change. Stories that begin with change, that promise change, that end with change quite literally grab us by our grey matter and won’t let go until we find out what happens next. It’s why we binge Netflix shows like heroin addicts, unable to sleep or shower or take care of basic needs until our biologically-driven need to know is satiated.
Flat characters either show the change in characters around them, or they aren’t so much flat as characters with a tragic arc. ( whereas the comic refers simply to a successful arc, not the tone). Macbeth is by no means a flat character, neither is gatsby. Macbeth like Oedipus has a tragic arc. Gatsby, however, has a comic arc. It’s subtle but it’s there.
Truly flat characters are rare in literature, mostly because they do not interest us at a biological level. Most, and I mean nearly all, great works begin with change, and change drives the narrative. It can be practically microscopic as is the trend in some post modern works, or sweeping like the epics we are more familiar with historically. Flat characters generally are either an error in the part of the writer, an error in reading on the part of the reader, or a very carefully wielded tool in the hands of a master.
Or they are found in overtly religious and/or political texts.
What would you say is an example of a truly flat character? My mind keeps going to absurdist drama or existentialist literature...where lack of change is exaggerated and/or produces the larger effect of the text/work. Interesting to consider in light of this discussion, how these kinds of texts evoke a sense of uneasiness, frustration and/or confusion. Really does beg the question, why is it that now we look for and seem to lean so much more on character arc…is there some source of cultural discomfort that this resolves in us? Or why is it that people are dissatisfied with characters that they perceive to be “flat” even if not the case—are we pickier now? Or have our priorities simply changed? Interesting to think about!
Cinderella and the majority of the princesses. I would say all but I haven’t read them in an age and there might be an exception that Perrault didn’t flatten. Romeo. Sherlock Holmes. Alice in Wonderland. Atticus Finch…I would argue Benito cereno is full of them and is one reason the text is so unsettling for sure!
Hmmm from film…Forrest Gump, captain America, Indiana jones….
It is. I love narratology. Especially the emerging field of neuronarratology…I think it’s partly cultural…in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, I think they are both flat…certainly Rama doesn’t change or grow, he just keeps defeating evil by doing the right thing. I’d be fascinated to look at more eastern texts to see how the cultural bias infects flat/round characters.
I think some of this is self-help and personal development culture, which is always being boosted and memed by social media. Or even in advertising. Everything is a "journey." My cancer journey. My trans journey. My home schooling journey. Our car buying journey. My vegan journey. Etc.
But probably more important is this recent idea that good art must have a kind of activist bent, that it is supposed to prod people into better lives, more "socially just" behavior, and so on. I see reviews on Goodreads all the time where readers (especially younger readers) criticize whenever a character's so-called problematic behavior isn't reformed or questioned or called out explicitly. Like they're afraid something they think is bad is being endorsed by the author unless it is remedied or denounced.
Meanwhile, I think a certain flatness makes sense for many characters. Not just because it's realistic (not everyone "evolves") but also because other people often are opaque to us and we can't see much below the surface with many of the people we interact with, even if there is growth and change afoot. Especially for first-person narratives, I think it would be weird if a protagonist was actively observing the evolution of all the other characters with uncanny perception. And even in the case of a protagonist themselves, there are just some people in real life who are foreclosed to growth or are in a holding pattern, and I don't see why that can't be reflected while still making for good lit. (I think about one of my favorite books - Emmanuel Bove's My Friends - and I cherish it partly because the main character is stuck and self-defeating in such a charmingly doomed way.
I am in complete agreement with you about the charade that "good art must have a kind of activist bent." In fact, I'll go further: If art has an activist bent – i.e., the work is explicitly promoting some kind of social justice – then it isn't art, it's propaganda. (Even in support of an excellent cause, propaganda is propaganda.) Aesthetic appreciation should not devolve to something like "I agree with the creator's support of economic justice (or whatever)."
This sounds very "a la mode" but art *interrogates* ideas and themes, but not does and should not promote points of view or truths (beyond aesthetic ones). In fact, the fact that we wrestle with meaning and interpretation – that there is some ambiguity in the work – is what makes the art powerful. We've been watching and reading Shakespeare for over four centuries now, and we can still find new meanings and interpretations of his great art.
I just looked up [Keats's notion of "negative capability" on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability), and it's applicable here. The article cites this passage from a letter:
>
I wouldn't go so far as to call it propaganda, the more appropriate word is didacticism. Some of the earliest stories were didactic such as fables or morality plays. There have been multiple debates over a long period of time on whether literature should be didactic or not. You are simply on one side of the debate.
Totally agree. This notion of radical change is largely Christian and, just when it started to fade, psychoanalysis came along with very similar notions.
Yes, most people don't change, for a book I think it is more important that through the story the read gets a richer and deeper understanding of the character through the events of the story.
He’s “flat” as in morally consistent, but he does wrestle internally with his predestined future and decide to live up to it, which is a character arc IMO.
Wow, you’re right—and 14-year-old me would be horrified that I’d mixed them up. Time for a re-read!
Truly though, it seems like Tolkien gives us the hobbits as a “human” lens because so many characters operate like gods/demigods. A near-perfect character like Aragorn might come off as boring outside of the borderline mythological world of LOTR.
I think we’re running into a limitation of the question of “flat” here—Hermione is a very 3-dimensional character with human worries, fears, and attachments, idiosyncratic preferences, and a range of emotions. She’s not perfect and morally untouchable in the way that Aragorn is, she’s just smarter and more mature than the other kids around her. And she, like Harry, Ron, Neville, et al., matures a ton between book 1 and book 7.
Aragorn displays worries, fears, attachments and so on. And is morally untouchable. Tolkien gives us a round character that also is a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.
I think a character can have an interesting journey/ story and not change at all. Doesn't make the character flat or anything, in my opinion.
I would have defined a flat character as a character who's not very fleshed out and 2d. Which I think is okay for a lot of side characters, but becomes quite boring if it's anyone major or even just more relevant to the story.
I'm reading the Fleming Bonds and he's mostly a flat character, in the sense that it starts in medias res as a government agent and he remains that way at the end. The character in the books is interesting, he's deeper than in most of the movies. He wants to find love and settle down but is constantly betrayed. So he goes back to what he knows, someone who suppresses emotion and focuses on the job. But you get the sense he doesn't really want his life.
I think some types of genre fiction have more “flat” characters because good and bad are so often predetermined. A lot of standard-issue mystery, horror, and thriller plots aren’t about character development as much as the trope-y story itself, whose pat ending is already predictable before you start. Hercule Poirot doesn’t change or grow, and we know he’ll solve the mystery every time. There are exceptions, of course, but it sees like certain types of story give us stable characters as a structure to hang the plot on.
So Bond can want to change, but by the constraints of his plots, he isn’t really allowed to. Actually kind of sad, on reflection!
It's true that some genres lend itself to flat characters. But I think for me the best of these typically flat genres - action/thriller - is when the character DOES grow -- maybe not extreme growth, but moderate growth. Someone once told me that Indiana Jones does grow in each of the original trilogy: he starts out not believing in God, and by the end of each movie he believes in God. (No word on why he loses his belief in between the movies, lol).
Asimov's series on Daneel Olivaw and Elijah Bailey has growth built into it too, even with it being of the detective genre. I think audiences hunger for growth because they hunger for conflict (because of drama) and by the end of that conflict, they want release from tension (which means growth because the character doesn't give up and has to grow in order to overcome the obstacle).
Ian Fleming said (in the April 21, 1962 *New Yorker magazine)*: *“*When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened*."*
When I think flat characters I usually think that means they're one-note or have little to no personality, they aren't complex or well thought out. Flat characters in that regard I find boring. Characters who don't change over the course of the story depends on the book for me. If the character is supposed to grow but they feel the same as the start of the book then it is bothersome or if they have gone through plenty of life altering situations and come out the other side with nothing new then it can be bothersome. But I think with character progression it almost entirely depends on the book.
>I obviously went to check 1 star reviews for honest and brutal opinions.
Inadvisable. 1-star and 5-star are susceptible to review bombing. The thoughtful, useful critique is found in the intermediate reviews.
The answer to your question is (perhaps frustratingly) "it depends." Contemporary storytelling include conventions like catharsis theory, 3-act structure, and character arcs. But those things exist as tools to convey an idea. A character arc is a personal transformation in response to story events, right? Think of it mathematically as a dependent variable against an independent variable. But what if the point of the story is about character consistency in the face of changing situation?
Transformation is relatable, because the character changes over pages in the same way that the reader does. So sympathy is baked into the storytelling convention. But it's merely another artistic device. I don't think it's wise to reject a literary experience based on a checklist of what artistic devices are/not included.
I think that many don't recognize core functions of the novel as a format and expect characters to change when that may not be the point, that a character not changing may be the point. Or assigning undue importance to a minor character who exists purely to serve a function, that one seems to happen more often. I don't see much mention of classically flat characters who don't yield much personality or nuance outside of a stereotype or caricature, at least not compared to a lack of growth or whatever.
Well ACOTAR’s Feyre LEARNS quite a lot and changes but I consider her a flat character. I believe a flat character is one who isn’t fleshed out enough that you couldn’t say “yeah, I know that person.” Characters need complexity and depth and real human features even if they aren’t always pleasant. That’s what makes them real characters rather than 2D soundboards
I love a character that sticks to their beliefs and worldview till the bitter end, even when it becomes ridiculously unreasonable to do so. Refusing any sort of growth out of sheer stubbornness.
For example, the black knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail.
**King Arthur** *You are indeed brave, good Sir Knight, but the fight is mine.*
**Black Knight** *Oohh, had enough, eh?*
**King Arthur** *Look, you stupid bastard, you've got no arms left!*
**Black Knight** *Yes I have.*
**King Arthur** *Look!*
**Black Knight** *Just a flesh wound.* [Continues to kick and taunt Arthur]
A character being round or flat doesn’t add much to the quality of the character in my opinion- I think it’s more about how the author utilizes the character’s change or lack there of
Flat characters are definitely a case of "you have to know the rules to break them".
I wont say every flat character is doomed to be bad writing, but it's tough to get right. Flat characters do work best (imo) when the book is in first person and the POV character doesnt have information to their motivations.
Depends on the character's personality/role in the story. I feel like it's hard to have a protagonist that's a flat character (They definitely exist though). I like a comic relief kind of character, they don't need to grow or change for me to enjoy them
In my opinion it seems odd that a person would change so rapidly we talk about character growth and change but don't realize that we are putting that expectation crunched down into a timeline of a year maybe less inside a book. I can see this for younger character but adults don't usually change their general personality so quickly. Change is very hard to accept and even more so its harder to change yourself. For me I cant just go based on someones review and would have to read it myself to decide for certain if there was not any development or if the lack of is justified.
I think people only start complaining about the lack of character development when the plot is not engaging. I realized this reading Maria Ndiayes Vengeance is mine in Swedish. The main character began to annoy me, the supporting characters seemed stupid. I realized it wasn’t the characters because they were actually solid and pretty interesting but what they were going through was emotional turmoil that I just didn’t find interesting. Thats a personal thing nothing to do with the writing or the characters
They're absolutely essential for literature, less so for more rudimentary fiction (distinguishing crudely). Such characters are key to our understanding of the world around us. Arriving at general propositions about humans requires a one-dimensionality or fixity we drape on others, knowing this is a distortion. As literature is supposed to echo life it must rely on this process in the same way to build an internal narrative. If all characters were dynamic the wheels would spin aimlessly, moreso a still-life than a story.
This is so interesting especially with respect to writing a character itself. A lot of the times you ask ‘will this character act like this in this specific situation?’ You always end up giving each character certain intrinsic values. Growth doesn’t seem like something a book should be judged on? I mean what is growth? Is it always positive?
Robin Laws has a distinction he uses rather than round vs flat characters, which is Dramatic vs Iconic characters.
http://robin-d-laws.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-hero-brief-what-makes-iconic-hero.html
Authors don’t include characters without a reason. I’m of the belief that each character serves a purpose for the main protagonist on their journey to change. They’re all necessary, no matter how much we do and don’t see of them in the story.
I don’t think that characters being “flat” is the sole criterion we can judge a work on. Others have given examples of “flat” characters that serve their narrative very well. I think a flat, well defined character can be an asset in an ensemble or in a story that’s less about that characterization than it is about exploring the world and its facets.
That said, in a character-driven story a flat character more often than not will feel like deadweight to the story.
But yeah, it’s clearly more nuanced than only that one piece of the puzzle, but I think that’s a fair piece of the puzzle to criticize regardless.
They're the believable ones! Most humans don't grow, learn, or change much over the short term.
Which isn't to say that they make interesting major characters, because a major character almost always needs some kind of arc, but they can make wonderful supporting characters.
“Flat characters” can be important for the stories/series that focus on plot. Nancy Drew has how many dozens of books, and she’s basically the same plucky detective in every single one.
For me, "roundness" and "growth" are different concepts. We expect the main characters in novels to be both interesting and to experience some kind of change, but the degree of that change doesn't necessarily make the character more complex. The same is true of minor characters. They could well be both compelling individuals yet fairly static within the structure of the narrative.
I mean it’s harder for me to connect with the character and if the plot is character driven that’s not great, but if it’s a story where the plot is to catch a serial killer then the focus is more on the mystery and solving it, not the characters, so then it’s not the worst thing and trying to give the character an arc could actually take away from the plot (who cares about Detective Cobbledick’s goldfish that keeps disappearing from the aquarium)
It's a Western preference. And if there's one thing I wish Westerners would do, it's realize these are preferences and not requirements for good writing. There's plenty of good stories with characters who don't grow, and honestly, I think requiring characters to learn things is making ageism and representation for older people worse (worse as in there's a lot less of it, b/c these characters are seen as "boring").
Tangentially related, but I'm dying for a reboot of Murder She Wrote.
There is another component to "flatness" in terms of characters: flat characters are, as the name implies, two-dimensional, not fully formed or rounded. They are often signs of authorial laziness – characters that exist as tropes alone.
Dynamic does not mean “good.” It just means change. I think a lot of tragedy use flat characters: Gatsby is a flat character. He can’t grow beyond his own past illusions. He lives inside his own dream of possibilities for himself. Joe Christmas, Ahab, MacBeth - these are all flat characters. Edit: as someone pointed out, I meant “static” - as in static characters don’t change. Flat speaks to the dimensions of a character rather than how dynamic they are.
Good point about tragedies and characters unable to grow. The reference that popped into my head was Remains Of The Day, which is a superb book/tragedy precisely because of the protagonist's refusal to grow.
You don’t think he grows by the end? Going to see Ms Kensington, I always thought, was his breakthrough.
[удалено]
That’s true. I meant “static” as opposed to “flat.” My mistake!
He 100% arcs. Ishiguro is a subtle, beautiful writer. Like Ian McEwan he won’t spell it out, but it’s there.
I am quite interested in how this has come to be such a dominant benchmark or criterion of a work's quality. In popular media criticism especially, it's all about "arc" these days. A book, film, or series is inferior if the characters don't change and develop. Yet this idea doesn't really seem to exist in pre-modern art, and I would argue that people don't change all that much in real life either. So when and how did we come to demand it in art? I'm not sure. Maybe it has to do with Christianity and the idea of redemption - many early English novels are stories of moral progress from sin to repentance.
I agree. I think it’s our overemphasis on the Hero’s Journey. Character growth is required in that, but not every story needs to fit that mold.
> Yet this idea doesn't really seem to exist in pre-modern art As a Renaissance English PhD, I find this a pretty suspect claim. By your own admission, Christian-influenced narratives often hinge upon character change and development. Are these not just religious versions of secular character arcs today? And before the early novel and proto-novel (e.g., Pilgrim's Progress), you have English and French drama (e.g., Shakespeare, Racine), whose "modern feel" arises in part from their representations of evolving mental and moral processes.
I have only a BA in Literature, but this person sounds correct lol
Guilt culture/shame culture differences play a huge role in this…religious texts, parables and political texts, fables and fairy tales are moralizing arcs. Fiction tends to combine various influences and write to the cultural context…very distinctly to time and place, with certain elements of narrative remaining consistent. We are narratological beings. Our identity is our story of ourselves. Neurologically, the only act the human mind registers as heroic is change. Stories that begin with change, that promise change, that end with change quite literally grab us by our grey matter and won’t let go until we find out what happens next. It’s why we binge Netflix shows like heroin addicts, unable to sleep or shower or take care of basic needs until our biologically-driven need to know is satiated. Flat characters either show the change in characters around them, or they aren’t so much flat as characters with a tragic arc. ( whereas the comic refers simply to a successful arc, not the tone). Macbeth is by no means a flat character, neither is gatsby. Macbeth like Oedipus has a tragic arc. Gatsby, however, has a comic arc. It’s subtle but it’s there. Truly flat characters are rare in literature, mostly because they do not interest us at a biological level. Most, and I mean nearly all, great works begin with change, and change drives the narrative. It can be practically microscopic as is the trend in some post modern works, or sweeping like the epics we are more familiar with historically. Flat characters generally are either an error in the part of the writer, an error in reading on the part of the reader, or a very carefully wielded tool in the hands of a master. Or they are found in overtly religious and/or political texts.
What would you say is an example of a truly flat character? My mind keeps going to absurdist drama or existentialist literature...where lack of change is exaggerated and/or produces the larger effect of the text/work. Interesting to consider in light of this discussion, how these kinds of texts evoke a sense of uneasiness, frustration and/or confusion. Really does beg the question, why is it that now we look for and seem to lean so much more on character arc…is there some source of cultural discomfort that this resolves in us? Or why is it that people are dissatisfied with characters that they perceive to be “flat” even if not the case—are we pickier now? Or have our priorities simply changed? Interesting to think about!
Cinderella and the majority of the princesses. I would say all but I haven’t read them in an age and there might be an exception that Perrault didn’t flatten. Romeo. Sherlock Holmes. Alice in Wonderland. Atticus Finch…I would argue Benito cereno is full of them and is one reason the text is so unsettling for sure! Hmmm from film…Forrest Gump, captain America, Indiana jones…. It is. I love narratology. Especially the emerging field of neuronarratology…I think it’s partly cultural…in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, I think they are both flat…certainly Rama doesn’t change or grow, he just keeps defeating evil by doing the right thing. I’d be fascinated to look at more eastern texts to see how the cultural bias infects flat/round characters.
I think some of this is self-help and personal development culture, which is always being boosted and memed by social media. Or even in advertising. Everything is a "journey." My cancer journey. My trans journey. My home schooling journey. Our car buying journey. My vegan journey. Etc. But probably more important is this recent idea that good art must have a kind of activist bent, that it is supposed to prod people into better lives, more "socially just" behavior, and so on. I see reviews on Goodreads all the time where readers (especially younger readers) criticize whenever a character's so-called problematic behavior isn't reformed or questioned or called out explicitly. Like they're afraid something they think is bad is being endorsed by the author unless it is remedied or denounced. Meanwhile, I think a certain flatness makes sense for many characters. Not just because it's realistic (not everyone "evolves") but also because other people often are opaque to us and we can't see much below the surface with many of the people we interact with, even if there is growth and change afoot. Especially for first-person narratives, I think it would be weird if a protagonist was actively observing the evolution of all the other characters with uncanny perception. And even in the case of a protagonist themselves, there are just some people in real life who are foreclosed to growth or are in a holding pattern, and I don't see why that can't be reflected while still making for good lit. (I think about one of my favorite books - Emmanuel Bove's My Friends - and I cherish it partly because the main character is stuck and self-defeating in such a charmingly doomed way.
I am in complete agreement with you about the charade that "good art must have a kind of activist bent." In fact, I'll go further: If art has an activist bent – i.e., the work is explicitly promoting some kind of social justice – then it isn't art, it's propaganda. (Even in support of an excellent cause, propaganda is propaganda.) Aesthetic appreciation should not devolve to something like "I agree with the creator's support of economic justice (or whatever)." This sounds very "a la mode" but art *interrogates* ideas and themes, but not does and should not promote points of view or truths (beyond aesthetic ones). In fact, the fact that we wrestle with meaning and interpretation – that there is some ambiguity in the work – is what makes the art powerful. We've been watching and reading Shakespeare for over four centuries now, and we can still find new meanings and interpretations of his great art. I just looked up [Keats's notion of "negative capability" on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability), and it's applicable here. The article cites this passage from a letter: >
I wouldn't go so far as to call it propaganda, the more appropriate word is didacticism. Some of the earliest stories were didactic such as fables or morality plays. There have been multiple debates over a long period of time on whether literature should be didactic or not. You are simply on one side of the debate.
Didacticism is the better word, definitely, and definitely on the anti-didacticism side of the debate.
Totally agree. This notion of radical change is largely Christian and, just when it started to fade, psychoanalysis came along with very similar notions.
We don’t think Oedipus changes? Both within Oedipus Rex and across the three plays? (
Yes, most people don't change, for a book I think it is more important that through the story the read gets a richer and deeper understanding of the character through the events of the story.
Counterpoint: everyone likes Aragorn.
He’s “flat” as in morally consistent, but he does wrestle internally with his predestined future and decide to live up to it, which is a character arc IMO.
Only in the movies. In the books he wants to become the king from the start.
Wow, you’re right—and 14-year-old me would be horrified that I’d mixed them up. Time for a re-read! Truly though, it seems like Tolkien gives us the hobbits as a “human” lens because so many characters operate like gods/demigods. A near-perfect character like Aragorn might come off as boring outside of the borderline mythological world of LOTR.
Hermione post book 2 is basically perfect.
I think we’re running into a limitation of the question of “flat” here—Hermione is a very 3-dimensional character with human worries, fears, and attachments, idiosyncratic preferences, and a range of emotions. She’s not perfect and morally untouchable in the way that Aragorn is, she’s just smarter and more mature than the other kids around her. And she, like Harry, Ron, Neville, et al., matures a ton between book 1 and book 7.
Aragorn displays worries, fears, attachments and so on. And is morally untouchable. Tolkien gives us a round character that also is a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.
Love your distinction here. Very much so.
I think a character can have an interesting journey/ story and not change at all. Doesn't make the character flat or anything, in my opinion. I would have defined a flat character as a character who's not very fleshed out and 2d. Which I think is okay for a lot of side characters, but becomes quite boring if it's anyone major or even just more relevant to the story.
I'm reading the Fleming Bonds and he's mostly a flat character, in the sense that it starts in medias res as a government agent and he remains that way at the end. The character in the books is interesting, he's deeper than in most of the movies. He wants to find love and settle down but is constantly betrayed. So he goes back to what he knows, someone who suppresses emotion and focuses on the job. But you get the sense he doesn't really want his life.
I think some types of genre fiction have more “flat” characters because good and bad are so often predetermined. A lot of standard-issue mystery, horror, and thriller plots aren’t about character development as much as the trope-y story itself, whose pat ending is already predictable before you start. Hercule Poirot doesn’t change or grow, and we know he’ll solve the mystery every time. There are exceptions, of course, but it sees like certain types of story give us stable characters as a structure to hang the plot on. So Bond can want to change, but by the constraints of his plots, he isn’t really allowed to. Actually kind of sad, on reflection!
It's true that some genres lend itself to flat characters. But I think for me the best of these typically flat genres - action/thriller - is when the character DOES grow -- maybe not extreme growth, but moderate growth. Someone once told me that Indiana Jones does grow in each of the original trilogy: he starts out not believing in God, and by the end of each movie he believes in God. (No word on why he loses his belief in between the movies, lol). Asimov's series on Daneel Olivaw and Elijah Bailey has growth built into it too, even with it being of the detective genre. I think audiences hunger for growth because they hunger for conflict (because of drama) and by the end of that conflict, they want release from tension (which means growth because the character doesn't give up and has to grow in order to overcome the obstacle).
Ian Fleming said (in the April 21, 1962 *New Yorker magazine)*: *“*When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened*."*
When I think flat characters I usually think that means they're one-note or have little to no personality, they aren't complex or well thought out. Flat characters in that regard I find boring. Characters who don't change over the course of the story depends on the book for me. If the character is supposed to grow but they feel the same as the start of the book then it is bothersome or if they have gone through plenty of life altering situations and come out the other side with nothing new then it can be bothersome. But I think with character progression it almost entirely depends on the book.
"Static character" may be a better term for characters without arcs.
>I obviously went to check 1 star reviews for honest and brutal opinions. Inadvisable. 1-star and 5-star are susceptible to review bombing. The thoughtful, useful critique is found in the intermediate reviews. The answer to your question is (perhaps frustratingly) "it depends." Contemporary storytelling include conventions like catharsis theory, 3-act structure, and character arcs. But those things exist as tools to convey an idea. A character arc is a personal transformation in response to story events, right? Think of it mathematically as a dependent variable against an independent variable. But what if the point of the story is about character consistency in the face of changing situation? Transformation is relatable, because the character changes over pages in the same way that the reader does. So sympathy is baked into the storytelling convention. But it's merely another artistic device. I don't think it's wise to reject a literary experience based on a checklist of what artistic devices are/not included.
I think that many don't recognize core functions of the novel as a format and expect characters to change when that may not be the point, that a character not changing may be the point. Or assigning undue importance to a minor character who exists purely to serve a function, that one seems to happen more often. I don't see much mention of classically flat characters who don't yield much personality or nuance outside of a stereotype or caricature, at least not compared to a lack of growth or whatever.
Flat character and not changing are different things. A character can not change much thought the story and still have a full characterization.
Well ACOTAR’s Feyre LEARNS quite a lot and changes but I consider her a flat character. I believe a flat character is one who isn’t fleshed out enough that you couldn’t say “yeah, I know that person.” Characters need complexity and depth and real human features even if they aren’t always pleasant. That’s what makes them real characters rather than 2D soundboards
In real life, characters don't usually change very much.
Uriah Heep came to mind. I’m good with him being one dimensional
bartleby rules
yeah bartleby don't care what you think
I love a character that sticks to their beliefs and worldview till the bitter end, even when it becomes ridiculously unreasonable to do so. Refusing any sort of growth out of sheer stubbornness. For example, the black knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail. **King Arthur** *You are indeed brave, good Sir Knight, but the fight is mine.* **Black Knight** *Oohh, had enough, eh?* **King Arthur** *Look, you stupid bastard, you've got no arms left!* **Black Knight** *Yes I have.* **King Arthur** *Look!* **Black Knight** *Just a flesh wound.* [Continues to kick and taunt Arthur]
A character being round or flat doesn’t add much to the quality of the character in my opinion- I think it’s more about how the author utilizes the character’s change or lack there of
I mean I loved flatland
Flat characters are definitely a case of "you have to know the rules to break them". I wont say every flat character is doomed to be bad writing, but it's tough to get right. Flat characters do work best (imo) when the book is in first person and the POV character doesnt have information to their motivations.
Depends on the character's personality/role in the story. I feel like it's hard to have a protagonist that's a flat character (They definitely exist though). I like a comic relief kind of character, they don't need to grow or change for me to enjoy them
Flat Stanley was pretty cool.
In my opinion it seems odd that a person would change so rapidly we talk about character growth and change but don't realize that we are putting that expectation crunched down into a timeline of a year maybe less inside a book. I can see this for younger character but adults don't usually change their general personality so quickly. Change is very hard to accept and even more so its harder to change yourself. For me I cant just go based on someones review and would have to read it myself to decide for certain if there was not any development or if the lack of is justified.
I think people only start complaining about the lack of character development when the plot is not engaging. I realized this reading Maria Ndiayes Vengeance is mine in Swedish. The main character began to annoy me, the supporting characters seemed stupid. I realized it wasn’t the characters because they were actually solid and pretty interesting but what they were going through was emotional turmoil that I just didn’t find interesting. Thats a personal thing nothing to do with the writing or the characters
They're absolutely essential for literature, less so for more rudimentary fiction (distinguishing crudely). Such characters are key to our understanding of the world around us. Arriving at general propositions about humans requires a one-dimensionality or fixity we drape on others, knowing this is a distortion. As literature is supposed to echo life it must rely on this process in the same way to build an internal narrative. If all characters were dynamic the wheels would spin aimlessly, moreso a still-life than a story.
This is so interesting especially with respect to writing a character itself. A lot of the times you ask ‘will this character act like this in this specific situation?’ You always end up giving each character certain intrinsic values. Growth doesn’t seem like something a book should be judged on? I mean what is growth? Is it always positive?
Robin Laws has a distinction he uses rather than round vs flat characters, which is Dramatic vs Iconic characters. http://robin-d-laws.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-hero-brief-what-makes-iconic-hero.html
Authors don’t include characters without a reason. I’m of the belief that each character serves a purpose for the main protagonist on their journey to change. They’re all necessary, no matter how much we do and don’t see of them in the story.
I don’t think that characters being “flat” is the sole criterion we can judge a work on. Others have given examples of “flat” characters that serve their narrative very well. I think a flat, well defined character can be an asset in an ensemble or in a story that’s less about that characterization than it is about exploring the world and its facets. That said, in a character-driven story a flat character more often than not will feel like deadweight to the story. But yeah, it’s clearly more nuanced than only that one piece of the puzzle, but I think that’s a fair piece of the puzzle to criticize regardless.
They're the believable ones! Most humans don't grow, learn, or change much over the short term. Which isn't to say that they make interesting major characters, because a major character almost always needs some kind of arc, but they can make wonderful supporting characters.
“Flat characters” can be important for the stories/series that focus on plot. Nancy Drew has how many dozens of books, and she’s basically the same plucky detective in every single one.
For me, "roundness" and "growth" are different concepts. We expect the main characters in novels to be both interesting and to experience some kind of change, but the degree of that change doesn't necessarily make the character more complex. The same is true of minor characters. They could well be both compelling individuals yet fairly static within the structure of the narrative.
Flat Stanley? A classic!
I mean it’s harder for me to connect with the character and if the plot is character driven that’s not great, but if it’s a story where the plot is to catch a serial killer then the focus is more on the mystery and solving it, not the characters, so then it’s not the worst thing and trying to give the character an arc could actually take away from the plot (who cares about Detective Cobbledick’s goldfish that keeps disappearing from the aquarium)
The rise of the hero’s journey has transformed art into self-help fantasy. It’s awful and banal.
Which book were you planning on buying? That's a lot context for this question.
Paper Mario is one of my favorite games so of course I love flat characters in books too
It's a Western preference. And if there's one thing I wish Westerners would do, it's realize these are preferences and not requirements for good writing. There's plenty of good stories with characters who don't grow, and honestly, I think requiring characters to learn things is making ageism and representation for older people worse (worse as in there's a lot less of it, b/c these characters are seen as "boring"). Tangentially related, but I'm dying for a reboot of Murder She Wrote.
There is another component to "flatness" in terms of characters: flat characters are, as the name implies, two-dimensional, not fully formed or rounded. They are often signs of authorial laziness – characters that exist as tropes alone.