Narrators and characters

Most fictional literary narratives used to be written in verse, but most for at least the last two or three centuries have been written in prose. Nevertheless prose can have many of the qualities that we find in poetry and consider to be "poetical" such as rhythm or alliteration. It also has its own systems of arrangement in patterns and blocks that can be annalogous to stanzas.

There are other categories of internal structure such as plot, the types of character that are included and how they are connected with one another, and the kinds of narration through which the actions of those characters are represented. Although, literary prose can seem more straightforward and less artful than poetry that is not necessarily the case.

In literary narratives, all persons - be they characters or narrators, or even, in rather different ways, the author and the reader - exist side by side, as functions of the text. Fictional charcters can be divided into two main categories: the "round" and the "flat".

Round character, with multiple dimensions to their personalities, reach inner lives and the capacity to develop are the main focus of the narrator's interest and probably of the reader's too.

Flat character are there to expand the fictional world surrounding the main, round, characters without drawing too much attention to themselves.

In some novels like Pride and Prejudice, there are characters that are totally the spotlight of the plot and strikes the other as flat: two-dimensional and incapable of change. Each gradually discovers depths and developments which is good for the main character. But think of the permanently flat characters that is dull and uninteresting. We never see the character from within because the author did not sides with that dull character.