Question: I've searched around and I can't seem to find a way to represent arrow keys or the escape key as single char in c++. Is this even possible? I would expect that it would be similar to \t or \n for tab and new line respectively. Whenever I search for escaped characters, there's only ever a list of five or six well known characters.

Answer: 
The short answer is no.

The long answer is that there are a number of control characters in the standard ANSI character set (from decimal 1 to decimal 31, inclusive), among which are the control codes for linefeed, carriage return, end-of-file, and so on. A few are commonly interpreted as arrows and the escape key, but only for compatibility with terminals.

Standard PC keyboards send a 2- or 3-byte control code that represents the key that was pressed, what state it's in, which control/alt/shift key is pressed, and a few other things. You'll want to look up "key codes" to see how to handle them. Handling them differs between operating systems and the base libraries you use, and their meaning differs based on the operating system's configured keyboard layout (which may include characters not found in the ANSI character set).
char variables usually represent elements in the ASCII table.  

<http://www.asciitable.com/>  

there is also man ascii on unix. If you want arrow keys you'll need a more direct way to access keyboard input. the arrow keys get translated into sequences of characters before hitting stdio. If oyu want direct keyboard access consider a GUI library, sdl, direct input to name a few.