 When we talk about flat characters and round characters, what we mean is that there is a difference between or some kind of distinction between characters who are superficial, predictable, or otherwise not very sophisticated. We usually call these characters flat and, on the other hand, round characters. Characters that have a certain kind of depth or complexity. The question is, what exactly is this depth? What makes a round character more interesting or more complex? If we look at a very famous narrative, let's take, for example, the very first Star Wars movie, Episode 4, A New Hope, 1977. We can see that Luke Skywalker, for example, is a good character. How do we know that he's good? Well, he has blue eyes, he has blonde hair, he wears white. We can talk about that when we talk about symbolism as opposed to Darth Vader, who is a bad character. How do we know he's bad? He's dressed in black, of course, which is very predictable and very superficial. How do we know that Obi-Wan Kenobi is a good character? He has white hair, he has a white beard. He looks like a religious figure, like a monk or someone who is pure and so on and so forth. What I would like to suggest is that these characters are flat characters. Not that they're not interesting. I think it's a fascinating narrative with captivating and memorable characters. I've watched it many times. But I do have to admit that there is not a lot of depth to these characters in the sense that they are, for the most part, stable. They are rarely confused and their behavior doesn't really confuse us. It's true that Luke Skywalker at the beginning is reluctant to join the rebellion, but once he does, that's it. He's committed to the cause. He never has second thoughts. He's completely dependable. He never does anything that is selfish or shocking or controversial or uncharacteristic. I think that when we talk about round characters, we're ultimately talking about characters who defy the whole idea of moral dichotomy. In other words, round characters cannot be referred to in terms of good or bad or good and evil or right and wrong. So if we take, for example, a more complex narrative, Wise Blood, a famous American novel by Flannery O'Connor, we can see a set of characters that are much more complicated than the superficial distinction between or division into good and bad. The main character, Hazel Mottes, is a young man who is an anti-preacher. He's against religion. He hates God. He hates Jesus. And he starts or he founds his own church. He calls it the Church Without Christ. Paradoxically, he is completely devoted to the Church Without Christ. He has a lot of faith in the Church Without Christ. He's an absolute believer in the truth of the Church Without Christ, which means that he's a very honest, very sincere, very serious person. When he's confronted by frauds, people who pretend to be representing God but are actually in the religion business to make money, he kills one of them. In that sense, he plays the role of an angry biblical prophet. Elijah, for example, his violent, his self-tortured. Toward the end of the novel, he blinds himself. And at the very end, he's willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and die for the sake of truth, for the sake of showing people that they are being deceived by fake preachers and false prophets. We could say that he really becomes a Christ figure. And it's very strange because he's not a very sympathetic character. He's not a lovable character. He's not Luke Skywalker. He's controlled by rage. He's a killer. He rejects the people who follow him and who love him, his own disciples, and he ends up dead. But that's a round character. Naturally, some characters in this novel are flat. These are all the greedy people who pretend to be righteous while cheating everybody in sight, for example, the landlady. Mrs. Flood, a sweet, old, lonely woman who I think is a horrible person and not so sweet at all. She's gluttonous and avaricious, and she doesn't change throughout the novel, even if she claims she does. It's interesting that we are often trained to look for depth when we examine literary characters, and sometimes it's hard for us to accept the fact that certain characters remain flat in spite of our tendency to think about them in terms of growth, or transformation, or some kind of an epiphany. I think that the point is that good fiction often presents a curious interplay of flat characters and round characters, and it's not always easy to tell which is which.