How to Read Literature Like a Professor: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

Foster explains that one of his favorite jokes in the classroom comes in the form of pointing out how quickly Hector’s charioteers are killed in The Iliad. This is the problem of surrogacy, or the fact that characters close to the hero/main character are likely to be killed because the main character won’t be. In The Iliad, Patroclus is Achilles’ best friend since boyhood—they even grew up together like brothers. One day, Patroclus wears Achilles’ armor in battle and is literally killed as Achilles’ surrogate. Rather than protecting him, Patroclus’ proximity and resemblance to Achilles put him in even greater danger.

Characters’ deaths are important plot devices. Patroclus’ death, for example, leads to an important and moving scene during which Achilles mourns his friend through ritual debasement. It also prompts Achilles to receive new armor forged by the gods, an important step in becoming “the greatest hero ever.” In fact, the death of the hero’s best friend is such a useful plot point that it happens all the time—think of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (1597) or Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans (1826).

Although this might seem unjust, it is important to remember that “characters are not people.” Although they may be based on real, living humans, characters are not real or alive. They are simply figments of the author’s and readers’ imaginations. While writers etch out an impression of a given character, readers inevitably “shape, or rather reshape, characters in order to make sense of them.” This makes us sympathetic to characters and invested in their fate.

With this understanding of characters in mind, Foster returns to the surrogacy trope. He examines three 20th century films that explore the idea of the dangers posed by a young, immature, and reckless character: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Top Gun (1986). All three movies feature a young man “at war with the world” who is forced to learn a terrible lesson when he accidentally causes the death of someone close to him. It is necessary that it is this proximate person who dies, and not the character himself—otherwise there would be no opportunity for the character to grow.

Secondary characters can be mercilessly killed off because works of literature are not fair—unlike in the real world, some characters’ lives matter more than others. The novelist and critic E.M. Forster explains that some literary characters are “round,” while others are “flat”––meaning some characters are complex, contradictory, and capable of growth, whereas others have a more simplistic, instrumental role to play. In real life, of course, everyone is a “round character,” but this is not true of works of literature, because characters are not actual people.

There are further reasons why not all characters are “round.” Firstly, if all characters were round, the reader would not know on whom they should focus their attention. Creating flat characters also saves the author the effort (and space on the page!), as the author does not have to develop a full, detailed back-story for everyone who happens to feature in the work. Furthermore, it would simply not be necessary to include this information for many characters, as the purpose they serve is more akin to a literary device (like rain) than an intricate depiction of a human person.

Note that although it is possible to speak of a binary between flat and round characters, in reality it is more of a continuum, with some characters being rounder—meaning more detailed, complex, and important—than others. Some authors rebel against the concept of having completely flat characters, and try to make each character at least a little round by including unique, memorable details about them. Other authors have taken minor characters from preexisting literature and put them in the spotlight of new works, such as Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), which borrows its titular characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Aristotle argued that “plot is character revealed in action,” meaning that plots must be driven by the choices, actions, and development of characters. Nowadays, we tend to equally follow this maxim in the other direction—characters are a function of plot. All characters, flat and round, share the task of providing narrative momentum, moving the story toward its conclusion.