[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yes, but who has ever heard of Thomas Love Peacock.

If I'd said that everyone must read Thomas Lovell Peacock and that no one should be allowed to read Dickens, then you might have the vestige of a sliver of a point. But since I've only said that I prefer Peacock, your comment seems a tad irrelevant.

If everyone likes Dickens and no one "has ever heard of Thomas Love Peacock," then that's more reason for me to mention Peacock. I can only read so many Dickens novels and absorb the same standard influences before it's time to consider reading people who aren't as well mined and might contribute to more unique ways of writing and thinking.

I think Dickens characters are far from flat, so there.

Dickens himself would have told you he uses flat characters -- not as his main characters, but as secondary or background characters. They're similar to the looped characters in a game of Grand Theft Auto -- the ones who always say the same things when you kick them out of a car, bump into them or chase them with a huge weapon.

Flat characters are a device that many, many novelists use. The problem for me is when flat characters are used to embody Christlike goodness, as they often are in Dickens. Good characters seem less cliche to me when they have depth. Since satire reduces people to their least noble qualities, and flat characterization is inherently reductive, the use of flat characters in satire seems far more resonant to me than in a tragedy.

Definition: Flat and round characters.

An example of a flat character who's given greater depth in an adaptation would be Kubrick's version of Dick Hallorann in The Shining. In the film, we see the character at home listening to complex jazz with a photo of a nude woman on his wall. His role as a mere good character (and, notoriously, as yet another example of King's Magical Negro problem) is undercut by his private expression of cynicism, culture, intelligence, distance from the world in which he is relegated to the role of super butler, and even sexuality that has nothing to do with the aesthetic standards of the people at the Overlook Hotel. In that moment in which Kubrick shows Hallorann's reluctance to leave the comfort of his apartment to rescue a child from people he perceives as idiots, a flat character in a tragedy acquires depth.