How is Bruno from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas a round and a dynamic character?

All characters in a work of fiction serve a purpose in telling a story for the reader. The manner in which a character is portrayed in a story allows him or her to come to life in the mind of the reader. In the book, Bruno fulfills the role of a dynamic and round character because he experiences significant changes, and throughout the process of change, he experiences certain events that cause him to become conflicted about his beliefs.

In a work of fiction, a dynamic character is someone who experiences a change over time. This change is generally a result of a conflict or major crisis that the character faces. Round characters encounter contradictory situations that compel them to undergo transformations. In Bruno’s case, he is introduced to the reader as a young, naïve nine-year old boy who grew up with everything he had ever wanted—a big house with maids, parents who cared for him, and a group of good friends. When he and his family move out of Berlin into the new house, he peers out his room window and sees the children in the concentration camp, and comments about how they don’t look friendly at all. At this point, he had no idea it was Auschwitz.

Later in the book, we see how Bruno’s attitude begins to change, especially when he continues to look out of his bedroom window at the concentration camp. He realizes that as much as he watched the people behind the fences and barbed wire, he had never stopped to think what all of it meant. He recognizes that “ as often as he had watched the people, all the different kinds of people in their striped pajamas, it had never occurred to him to wonder what it was all about”.

When he meets Shmuel, he notices that Shmuel is skinny, and his skin looks gray, but is oblivious as to why. He thinks that Shmuel must have dozens of friends who play together for hours a day. He even tells Shmuel that Germans are superior. When Shumel relays the story of how he ended up at the camp, Bruno somehow believes they experienced the same because he too was forced to move. Bruno also has a difficult time believing that the trains they rode on to the camp were different. This is evident when he states that “Shmuel looked very sad when he told this story and Bruno didn’t know why; it didn’t seem like such a terrible thing to him, and after all much the same thing had happened to him.”

When Shumel displays a dislike for the soldiers, Bruno faces an internal conflict because although he dislikes Leutenant Kotler, he reasons that they must not all be bad because his father, also a soldier, is a good man. Nonetheless, Bruno slowly realizes that something is horribly wrong. He begins to notice Shumel’s hands: “Bruno couldn’t help but notice that it was like the hand of the pretend skeleton that Herr Liszt had brought with him one day when they were studying human anatomy.”

We notice Bruno’s most important change when he decides to help Shumel look for his father. During that moment, he truly becomes altruistic. Unfortunately, he is killed before he can truly comprehend the horrific realities of Auschwitz.