A flat character is one who undergoes little substantial change throughout a story, and who has few complex, developed feelings. Never experiencing noteworthy emotional development during a narrative, a flat character tends to lack in internal conflict.

In Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, all of the characters except Moses are flat. Schmitt gives the boy’s nameless parents only simplistic emotional traits—so few as to be enumerated on one hand—make them less rich characters than hastily sketched types (the depressed son of Holocaust victims, the unhappy wife who married only to flee her parents). Moses’s parents matter in the work only in that they created him and have had profound effects on him.

Monsieur Ibrahim is also a completely flat character, whose infinite beneficence is a similarly non-nuanced approach to describing character. While essential to the plot development, Monsieur Ibrahim doesn’t undergo change. Rather, he enters the story line as an avatar of goodness, whose function it is to interact with Moses and effectuate life-altering changes in him.