When we read a novel, we come to know the characters who “populate” it by taking into
consideration various aspects of them such as: their physical appearance; their social standing;
their feelings; what they tell and do; what other characters feel or say about them; what the
narrator implies about them. To be convincing fictional characters normally resemble real people.
But they are not, of course, real people at all! They may represent real or historical people but,
however, they exist only in that imaginary world of fiction the writer has created.
In order to understand them we have to consider:
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A – How they are created:
Through their actions,
Interaction with other
Characters (dialogues),
monologues, interior monologues.
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through the narrator ‘s
description, comments
and tone.
Through a mixture of the two methods
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B – types of characters:
Flat (or closed)
two – dimensional lack of development
The division between Flat and Round
characters does not imply a judgement of
value.
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round (or open)
tri – dimensional
more complex development
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C – Their function in the plot: are they main
or minor characters?
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D – through the physical or social setting to
which they belong.
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Character is the most single important component in a novel: Other narrative forms, such as epic,
and other media, such as film can tell a story just as well , but nothing can equal the great tradition
of the European novel in the richness, variety and psychological depth of its portrayal of human
nature. Yet character is probably the most difficult aspect of art of fiction to discuss in technical
terms. This is partly because there are so many different types of character and so many different
ways of representing them: major and minor characters, flat character and round character (as
E.M. Forster defines them in his Aspects of the Novel), characters rendered by inside their minds
and characters viewed from outside by others.
The simplest way to introduce a character , common in older fiction, is to give a physical
description and biographical summary.
In the present work , the comparison between Friday in Robinson Crusoe and the monster in
Frankenstein is carried out to show the function of two flat characters in older fiction; whereas the
comparison between Richardson’s Pamela Andrews and Joyce’s Molly Bloom, two round
characters, aims at demonstrating how the traditional technique has been replaced by the stream
of consciousness technique in orientating the reader’s reactions and rendering him sympathetic
or unsympathetic with the character.
