The Transformation Imperative

This week, the Story Euphoria podcast reaches the end of a four-episode celebration of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, witnessing one of the most famous and profound character transformations in popular culture: the hard-bitten and selfish Scrooge reclaims a child-like sense of joy and wonder. Because this transformation is “the point” of the story, the novella could be considered a transformation story.

Of course, the argument can be made that all stories are transformation stories. Students of the literary arts are often told that the characters in their stories must change in the course of the telling. Dynamic characters, we are informed, are much more desirable than static ones. Perhaps minor characters can be static, but hero protagonists must change for a story to be successful.

But is this really true?

Let’s imagine a story where the central character doesn’t change: Frank is unhappily married at the beginning of the story and sees himself as the victim of all the forces in his life—his wife, his job, his ungrateful children. During the course of the novel, his wife leaves him, his son evades a narcotics arrest by burning the garage down, he looses his daughter to an aggressive cancer, he wins a trip to Tahiti but also loses his job. However, at the end of all this, Frank’s outlook is the same. He still sees himself as the victim of these events and is passively dragged through them by his dedicated author.

Reading this, we might be frustrated by Frank and give up on reading his story—that is the risk his author runs. However, can we really say, despite the pains the author has taken to make it so, that Frank is completely unchanged? Maybe the first line of the book is Frank coming back from work, saying, “I’m home.” At the end of the book, he gets back from Tahiti, suntanned, parking his car out in the snow because the garage is yet to be replaced. When he walks in and says, “I’m home,” to the empty house, the very context of all that has happened has completely changed the impact of the words. Frank may be stubbornly entrenched in his self-pity, but he is in a different place at the end of the story than he was at the beginning, and this embodies his own transformation on a subtle level, if not on the grandiose level of Scrooge. We, the readers, can’t help but read him differently than we did at the beginning, no matter how hard the author tries to keep him the same. So, Frank has changed.

My example of Frank may be poor, so let’s look at an example from the literary cannon. Critics have suggested that the heroine of the epic Gone with the Wind is a static character, and that Melanie, as a very dynamic character, is the true heroine. But the book is not written with Melanie as the centerpiece, the vortex around which the other characters and events revolve. From beginning to end, we are emphatically concerned with Scarlet and her point of view. Yet the critics do have a point: after all she goes through—ravaged by the austerities of the Civil War, widowed, punished by the death of her child, et cetera—up to the last page of the book she is still using her same old wiles to snare her man.

Yet, enough has changed in her life and the lives of the other characters that, despite her resilience of spirit (which indeed, is a prominent theme of the story), Scarlet is in a different place. The focus of her affection has, perhaps sincerely, changed from Ashley Wilkes to Rhett Butler. Rhett famously refuses her, and by virtue of leaving the story at this juncture it is easy for the reader to imagine that Scarlet’s infatuation for him is not only sincere now, but is going to grow more tenacious, as it did for the unobtainable Ashley. And if her feelings have changed, then Scarlet herself has surely changed, even if she is also the “same old” Scarlet.

In short, the events of the book have made it impossible for her not to change. All supports her old character relied upon, other than Rhett, are dead or in other ways removed from her, and Rhett himself abandons her on the last few pages. With a change as big as this in all things against which she could be identified, the old Scarlet can no longer exist. It may have taken over 1,000 pages of narrative to do it, but she has no hope at the end but to change, and that change is the tragic taste the last page leaves in the back of the mouth.

To expand the Scarlet Principle to stories at large, just consider what is necessary for a story to be a story. It’s like the old newspaperman’s adage: “Dog Bites Man” is not a story, but “Man Bites Dog” is. A story happens whenever something out of the ordinary happens, something that only happens once in the lives of the characters who figure within it. Anything else is just a character sketch or a situation from which there is no outcome. In other words, the very nature of a story mandates that the principle characters journey through events remarkable enough to trouble an author to write about them. Characters cannot go through such events without being at a different place, physically or emotionally, than they were at the beginning. Being in a different place is just another way of saying that the characters have transformed.

So rather than asking if characters must change for a story to be successful, perhaps it is more useful to ask whether the story takes its characters from one place to another—that is, if anything happens in the story. Likewise, if the characters in a story do honestly feel static throughout (really static, not like Frank or Scarlet), then it is a sign that the story hasn’t become a story yet. Once it blossoms, there is no choice for characters but to change, as surely as the tide is pulled by the moon, for change is the by-product of story.