Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries & Analyses contain references to rape and death by suicide.

In the first half of the novel, the Square explains what life is like in Flatland. He addresses Flatland’s geography, the various social occupied by different shapes, and the history of a relatively recent uprising against the priestly class.

The Square begins by emphasizing that the inhabitants of Flatland do not refer to it by that name, but he does so because it helps readers—who presumably live in a three-dimensional world he calls “Space”—understand what Flatland looks like (3). He compares Flatland to “a vast sheet of paper” covered with geographical shapes that can move back and forth on the paper’s surface but are never able to rise above or off of it (3). Nothing that exists in Flatland could be accurately described as solid, which, he says, can make it difficult for inhabitants to distinguish between one another. To illustrate this point, he instructs the reader to place a penny on the flat surface of a table and take note of how the penny’s shape changes as the observer gradually lowers their gaze so that it is now aligned with the edge of the table: The penny now appears as a straight line rather than a circle.