Highly conflicted characters keep us reading.

Fiction. Storytelling. Theater. Make-believe.

Maybe it seems like a safe way to come to terms with our highly conflicted selves.

When dishonesty or a shallow eye writes characters that fall flat, we feel bored or betrayed.

Bored because they aren’t alive.

Betrayed because they aren’t like us.

A character’s struggles must be as much as internal as external. Don’t just face the hero with hard things. Face him with the one thing he fears most in order to save someone else. Make her deepest-held fears wrestle with her deepest-held ideals. Hold up the two virtues a character values most and offer an “either or.”

In their weakness, they are strong. The strong know how to be vulnerable.

Why do we know this, deep down?

Minor characters can be flat, and we don’t notice. But major characters need inner battles or we disconnect.

Mr. Darcy. Jean Valjean. Margaret Hale.

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And then there’s the kid with no name.

I don’t know if I’d call his an inner conflict. But there are things that don’t seem to belong together.

He’s one of the most interesting characters I’ve met.

I met him in a book called Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli. I picked up the audiobook for one dollar. The library was getting rid of it. Presumably because it’s a children’s book about a Polish Gypsy boy who wants to be a Nazi. (I assume some parents complained.) And, as it happens, the boy’s best friends are Jews. So obviously, there’s going to be some kind of inner struggle, sooner or later. Even if it comes as one decisive blow.

“This is crazy,” I thought when I read the back cover. It got crazier.

The kid knows nothing. No one taught him to fear. No one taught him to hate. No one taught him who he is. When the book opens, he only knows one thing—how to survive. Seriously, he doesn’t even know his own name.

We meet a puzzle.

Innocent, naïve, and a lawbreaker, a thief.

Who is he really? What are we to make of him?

He sees the marching and wants to be a Nazi.

Then, “What’s an angel?” he asks.

Wow.

This book is not for the faint of heart. But I don’t think you are, if you read this far.