49 pages • 1 hour read
E. M. ForsterAspects of the Novel
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1927A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “People”
While the previous chapter addresses the story—“what” happened, and “when”—these next two chapters address the “who” of the novel. While the story deals primarily with time, the aspect of “people” begins to incorporate value into the novel. Forster points out that all actors within a novel are inherently human or at least anthropomorphic. He draws a distinct line here between fiction and all other forms of art because only fiction allows and insists that the artist employ his connection to other people.
Forster pursues the question of how, precisely, the characters in a novel differ from real people. Real people have a hidden inner life that can only be known in a memoir or a historical account when the person chooses to allow that inner life to show on the surface. The novelist, however, creates the inner life of the character and can describe this inner life without the character revealing it. Fundamentally, the hidden inner workings of a character are intentionally created by the novelist in stark contrast to real people, whose inner workings are often incidental.
Forster moves to understand the character in a novel through five elements of human existence: “birth, food, sleep, love and death” (75). First, he considers birth and death together, explaining that those two experiences are simultaneously universal and unknown. They can be perceived by witnesses, but the actual experience is hidden from the individual. The novelist cannot, any more than any other person, know the individual experience of death or birth; however, a novelist can decide at what point to begin exposing a character’s inner life between those experiences.
Forster then says that food and sleep encompass a significant portion of human life. However, like birth and death, those two experiences are so common and so human that they are largely ignored in history and memoir. Fiction, however, can treat these human facts differently; later in the chapter, he will directly address how it can do this.
He says the final fact of life is love. Initially, Forster focuses his discussion on the aspect of love expressed in sexual reproduction. He presents the perspective that all love could be seen as an outgrowth of the biological necessity of reproduction and the perspective that love transcends that biological necessity. He says most people spend relatively little time making love or eating, but many of their actions relate to those experiences. Then, he turns to fiction and analyzes how the novelist approaches these facts when creating characters.
The birth of a character in a novel is typically related as a simple fact, and then the infant is largely ignored until the character can behave as a person. Sometimes, birth is treated with a sense of nostalgia, but the experience of being born is still beyond the scope of even the novelist. Death, in contrast, is explored much more fully by the novelist. This is, in part, because the death of a character provides a natural ending to a novel. More importantly, Forster says, death’s mysteries are easier to probe than birth’s.
He says that food in a novel serves to bring people together and create a social environment. With regard to sleep, he says a character’s dreams and sleep are used to enhance or explain the actions of the day. Love, however, is a primary focus of the novel, especially romantic or sexual love. Forster sees two reasons for this: The novelist experiences love while creating characters and makes them unduly sensitive to this emotion; also, it is convenient to end a book with a marriage.
Forster then turns to a discussion of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders from the 1722 novel of the same name. He summarizes the novel with an eye to how the character herself affects the creation of the story and plot. Moll is the entirety of the novel, not because the novel is the story of her life, but because the story of how she is and who she is is the novel. Although Moll is the center and purpose of the novel, Forster asserts that it is impossible to believe that she is a real person rather than a character. Moll, like all other novel characters, has an inner life that is entirely and wholly known by the author. As a result, the people of a novel are richer to the reader than any real person could be.
Chapter 4 Summary: “People (Continued)”
Moving away from the relationship between real and fictional characters, Forster turns to the relationship between the characters and the novel’s forms and functions. He compares Moll Flanders and Miss Bates, a minor character from Jane Austen’s Emma, to demonstrate how a character can either stand on their own or be integral to plot and theme. While Moll Flanders appears lifelike because of her individual depth, Jane Austen’s character is woven into the plot and the lives of the other characters and cannot stand on her own as an individual character.
Forster says that exploring the people within a novel reveals the novelist’s challenge in creating characters who are true to life. Characters, by dint of their similarity to people, must be handled carefully so they do not take over the story or are not diminished by the same story. Forster briefly touches on the additional challenges of drama in terms of incorporating actors and actresses into a play’s performance, and he then focuses the chapter’s discussion on characters and point of view.
Forster says characters in a novel can be either “flat” or “round.” Flat characters are limited and often one-dimensional; they usually embody a single idea. On the other hand, round characters are multi-dimensional and develop and grow over the course of a novel. Flat characters can be useful both to novelists and readers since they can illustrate a thematic point. Unlike round characters, a flat character remains unchanged throughout the novel, which relieves the novelist of having to wrestle a character into submission. For the reader, the flat character provides a sense of soothing permanence and a predictability that enhances memory.
In consideration of Norman Douglas’s critique of characters in a novel, chiefly that they must be diminished because they are characters, Forster provides an alternative defense of flat characters. Using Charles Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick as an example, Forster shows how a flat character can appear to have more depth on the page, which in turn lends credibility to the single idea that the character embodies. However, the flat character works better in a comedic work or role than in a tragic one. Tragedy requires the reader’s sentiment to agree with the sentiment of the novel, and the absence of round characters diminishes the power and impact of the tragic novel.
Turning to a more in-depth discussion of round characters, Forster once again focuses on the work of Jane Austen, specifically on Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park. While she is apparently one-dimensional, in response to a major crisis, she reveals that she has significantly more to her than originally described. In comparison to Dickens’s largely flat characters, Forster says that the rounding potential of all of Austen’s characters enhances her novels.
Instead of expanding on the value of round characters in a novel, Forster provides several examples of round characters—like all the main characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and many of Dostoevsky’s and Proust’s characters—and their effects on their respective novels. This yields the primary definition of a round character: This character is capable of being both convincing and surprising.
Moving on to discuss point of view, Forster defines the three primary approaches a novelist can take to point of view: third person omniscient, third person limited, and first-person. An omniscient narrator sees and knows everything, including the inner minds of all the characters. A limited narrator is confined to knowing the inner workings of just a few characters or even just one character. A first-person narrator uses “I” and tells a story from the perspective and understanding of only one character. However, some novels use more than one point of view. Forster argues that the ability of the novel to use varying points of view or shifting points of view is one of the hallmarks of the novel’s power. The shifting point of view echoes the human ability to understand some people and not understand others, depending on levels of intimacy and effectiveness of communication.
Forster ends the chapter with a criticism of authors who use a third person narrator to comment on the characters themselves. This technique allows for the distinct likelihood of the reader losing their sense of the character as a parallel person in a parallel universe. Forster argues that this technique damages the willing suspension of disbelief and diminishes the novel for both the reader and the author.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
These chapters illustrate the importance of characters in the novel. While story is the most fundamental aspect of the novel, Forster argues that on its own, it yields only chronology. On the other hand, people—or characters—add value, which is essential to a novel. Forster chooses to split his discussion of people in novels into two parts, devoting more time and space to this aspect when compared to “story,” highlighting the source of value in the novel, which comes from the people themselves. The more obvious structure of this book would be to follow story with plot, rather than move from story to people; but, according to Forster, the people are the bridge between the action and the reason for the action. Without the people, the plot can’t exist. So, Forster links “story” with “plot” via the bridge of the “people.”
Forster firmly establishes The Innate Humanity of the Novel in this pair of chapters that discuss people. At the very beginning of his discussion of people in the novel, he connects the lived experience of actual people with the construction of characters in the mind of the novelist. There are, then, two elements of humanity within the construction of the novel. First, the novelist must use their own understanding and experience as a person interacting with other people to craft characters who reflect the reality of human experience. Second, the characters in a novel are ideally distillations of real people that demonstrate fundamental truths of human experience. Humanity is inextricable from the novel because the novelist must unify their lived human experience to create realistic characters within the novel. In contrast to drama, which focuses on people as well, the novel is the only art form that requires the development and narration of the hidden inner life of the human being.
Perhaps the most well-known concept from Aspects of the Novel is Forster’s identification of “flat” and “round” characters. Throughout the book, from the Introduction onward, he pairs similar concepts. In the Introduction, he provides pairs of novel excerpts that demonstrate his idea that time itself has little effect on the style or structure of the novel, which then leads into his discussion of how the story of a novel must exist in time. Forster follows this with two chapters focusing on people, one which focuses on what he calls “Homo Sapiens and Homo Fictus” (87), and one which focuses on the two elements of “Homo Fictus.” Notably, he coins his own terms to advance his arguments, allowing him room to define and discuss his precise intentions. He does the same with the terms “flat” and “round” characters, which is how even contemporary characters are often discussed. Although a “flat” character is often one-dimensional and fails to develop over the course of a novel, Forster doesn’t use the terms “undeveloped” or “one-dimensional” to describe these characters. Instead, he uses “flat,” which is more evocative of the full function of the character. Moreover, it allows Forster to make his larger argument about the foundation of the novel: Every novel is well served by having a variety of characters. The flat characters serve a purpose beyond merely accentuating the fullness of the round characters. This is why Forster avoids already-employed phrases like “developed” versus “undeveloped,” thereby avoiding the negative connotations these old terms are attached to.
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