Are the characters in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged flat due to philosophic consistency?

Ethan -

Here are some of my (somewhat disconnected) thoughts on this subject.

- The appropriate mathematical analogy for a "flat" character is "*two*-dimensional."

- "Flat" is not necessarily bad. If a story has more than a handful of characters, some of them will have to be flat by necessity (the limits of space and artistic selectivity). For example, Mr. Thompson in Atlas Shrugged is an appropriately flat character. Since the novel dramatizes how mindless drones end up in power in an irrational culture, giving Mr. Thompson "roundness" would actually be a distraction.

- The true pejorative used by writers is "cardboard." This refers to a character that stands out as stilted, unreal, and generally *inappropriately* simple for the context.

- People who disparage Rand's characters usually make a general accusation ungrounded in specific facts. The burden is upon them to support their argument.

Used as a technical term, the expression "flat character" was first coined by the British novelist E. M Forster in his brief handbook "Aspects of the Novel." There's a very well known chapter in which Forster distinguishes between "flat" and "round" characters. A "flat" character is a kind of stock character (e.g., the old Commedia dell'Arte used nothing but flat stock characters) who was immediately recognizable by the reader or viewer, and whose choices within the story-world are highly predictable. These character themselves don't change, or reflect on their own choices in any meaningful way. They're not supposed to. Their choices are completely at the mercy of something other than their own freedom of will: e.g., economic class, ethnicity, religious conviction, etc. Their function within the narrative is simply to act as a foil for the protagonist by throwing various obstacles in his way (the protagonist is usually a "round character", capable of introspecting for the purpose of analyzing and changing his choices), and to push the plot along in minor ways. As compared to the Fountainhead, most of the characters in Atlas Shrugged are definitely "flat", since the story itself is more like allegory than a traditional romantic novel (in allegory, the characters are symbolic embodiments of ideas). Because the protagonist is usually, by necessity, a round character, my own opinion is that the real protagonist in AS is Dagny, not Galt, the latter being very much a flat character.