Character REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Characters are men or women who suffer, do action and experience such event in novel. According to Hudson 1913: 170-171:
Secondly, such things happen to people and are suffered or done by people ; and the naen and women
who thus carry on the action form its dramatis personæ or characters.
The imaginative idea of author of literary work can be seen in how the character in literary work is developed. Although character is one of important
element in literary work and represents human in real life, character in literary work is not as simple as human in real life. As stated by Perrine 1984:66 the
characters in literary work are more complex, ambiguous, and variable than human in real world. This thing makes the readers difficult to understand how and
what the character is, especially for the readers who read literary work just to entertain themselves. For this type of readers, they will enjoy read the plot
represented in literary work than have deep understanding about how and what the character is. They will remember the order of event easily and can tell about the
story for many times, but they will have difficulty to describe how the character is. They can only say whether the character is good or bad.
According to Perrine 1984: 42, there are two types of character, protagonist and antagonist. Protagonist is a character who becomes the central of
the conflict and character against protagonist is called antagonist. The central characters in a conflict, whether
sympathetic or unsympathetic as persons, are referred to as protagonists; the forces arrayed against them,
whether persons, things, conventions of society, or traits of their own characters, are the antagonists.
Based on its complexity, characters can be divided into flat and round. According to Perrine 1984: 68, “flat characters are characterized by one or two
traits; they can be summed up in a sentence.” Then, according to Klarer 1999:
17, “flat character is dominated by one specific trait.” Although flat characters only have one or two specific traits, flat characters can easily memorable in the
hands of expert author. Perrine 1984: 69 asserts that: Flat characters, though they touch life at only one or
two points, may be made memorable in the hands of expert author through some individualizing detail of
appearance, gesture or speech.
Round characters are the opposite of flat characters, if the flat characters are the simple characters in a story; round characters are more complex characters. They
have more than two traits. According to Perrine 1984: 68, “Round characters are complex and have many sides; they might requi
re an essay for full analysis.” Klarer 1999: 17 also states that “The term round character usually denotes a
persona with more complex and differentiated feature.” Perrine 1984: 68-69 asserts “They live by their very roundness, by the many points at which they
touch life.”