posted
Came across this piece about character. 'Round' characters and 'flat' characters elicit reassessment. The role of character in fiction is analyzed succinctly in this piece, which maintains a refreshing distance from touted conventions while it acknowledges and comments on them.
A short excerpt, from well down the page:
quote: I would be quite happy to abolish the very idea of "roundness" in characterisation, because it tyrannises us - readers, novelists, critics - with an impossible ideal. "Roundness" is impossible in fiction, because fictional characters, while very alive in their way, are not the same as real people. It is subtlety that matters - subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure - and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do. Forster's division ("round" vs. "flat" characters) grandly privileges novels over short stories, since characters in stories rarely have the space to become "round". But I learn more about the consciousness of the soldier in Chekhov's 10-page story "The Kiss" than I do about the consciousness of Waverley in Walter Scott's eponymous novel, because Chekhov's inquiry into how his soldier's mind works is more acute than Scott's episodic romanticism.
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