Social Sciences and Humanities Open (Jan 2023)
Protagonist's belonging: The characters' classification in Mo Yan's frog
Abstract
Usually, the novel is described as a literary genre that takes “characters” as the center and reflects the social life through the description of the complete story plot and specific environment, or a literary genre that reflects the social life through the expansion of the plot and the rendering of the environment. Only by understanding the characters created by the author and their intention can we further analyze the theme of the novel. A novel Frog describes a group of people who lived in Gaomi, Shandong Province with a different life consciousness and life attitude toward the family planning policy. The article applied the theory of Flat and Round Character proposed by E. M. Förster and follows qualitative descriptive method proposed by Creswell (2003), an effective model that occurs in a natural setting that enables the researcher to develop a level of detail from being highly involved in the actual experiences, attempts to explore the various key characteristics in the characterization and narration of the novel which indicate how and why these two characters were formed in this manner and how the writing style of the author has developed these characters into becoming flat and round characters. The result of the analysis shows that flat characters in a novel Frog are more pointed than this group of indifferent and numb male characters. Their personalities are distinct and clear at a glance, and there is no change in the entire novel, so they are easy to identify. While, flat characters are often used by authors to convey a fixed and single value, or as a container for advanced social ideas.
