Hi Sebastian,

Those are great questions! I do agree that Madame Defarge is a bit more complicated than a typical flat character–however, I wouldn’t say she has all the traits associated with round characters. Her actions are predictable, and she isn’t bestowed with the layers of nuance and self-contradiction that are typical of round characters. We never see her grapple with complexity, and her role in the story is simply as vengeful antagonist. What is complex are her motives for vengeance, so she still serves the novel by complicating the themes of class and conflict. As a result, she’s kind of in the middle, and it’s good to see flatness and roundness as ends of a spectrum, rather than concrete binaries. (We treat them as binaries for the purposes of this article, but I might amend that based on your comment!)

As for Poirot, I don’t know if I’ve read his final novel. But, he is a flat character in the vast majority of his novels, so all I can say is that he usually functions as a flat protagonist. I’ll have to read that novel some time!

In general, I agree with Alan Moore’s insights on character complexity. Good and bad are highly subjective, and different readers bring different interpretations. Let’s say, for example, you have a protagonist that’s polygamous. One reader might think this makes them a bad person, because they’re greedy and unfaithful. A different reader might say this is a positive trait, as they’re not possessive and want their partners to remain free and untethered. Because people will fall into different camps, it’s not enough to simply reduce traits to “good” or “bad” — rather, we should treat characters with empathy and understand their traits and perspectives using the whole English lexicon.

People in real life are neither wholly good or bad; those terms are subjective, the human experience is highly nuanced, and round characters allow us to sit inside that nuance and consider our own thoughts and morals.

You certainly don’t need characters to be round for a story to be good–some of the best novels out there have flat protagonist. Many thanks for your comment!

I’m assuming superheroes like spiderman and batman and such would be considered fully rounded out characters even though they’re archetypes because they are fully explored and fleshed out. I was watching this video by Alan Moore on how to make three dimensional characters and he was saying that being a good guy or a bad guy equals one dimensional character and that adding a flaw equals two dimensional but three dimensional is someone who’s not good or bad. I think that’s entirely idiotic as you can obviously flesh out good guys or bad guys and explain why they’re like that. What are your thoughts on the matter?

I don’t think you always need rounded characters to have good stories as I’ve been reading short horror stories where the characters aren’t that fleshed out but I still enjoy the stories. In one story there is a guy who kills his friend because he wouldn’t give him a loan. He then buries the body at a beach in wintertime and then gets nervous about the body and ends up getting killed at the end. Now is this a flat character or a rounded character as it’s explained why he killed the guy, their past together and his actions are what makes the plot happen and not vice versa. I’d still lean on flat as he’s not developed that much beyond what the story needs for us to know but I’m not entirely sure.

Thank you, Kaci, I’m glad this helps!