Character Change is Oversimplification

“Happily ever after” is an age-old trope, and we know that reality is subtler than that. The ending of a story does not mean the rest of life will run smoothly. But a happily-ever-after ending makes sense in fiction: because the story at some point has to end, and an ending that reads, “And life continued to be just as challenging as it was throughout this novel” seems to repudiate everything readers have worked for all the way through. It is easy enough to see why fiction might diverge from reality here, but I think it goes deeper than the ending.

Picking up the red thread of verisimilitude in fiction that we have traced here many times on Words Like Trees, let us explore briefly today how fiction distorts the world, whether that matters, and what that means for us as writers.

The turning point

A lot of fiction, both commercial and literary, uses the notion of a single turning point for a character’s situation. A slowly-building conflict rises, rises, and then it turns a corner. A point of no return, a point at which after this moment, things will never be the same.

I think of the ending to George Orwell’s 1984 as a prototypical psychological turning point. Winston Smith, captured and tortured in the Ministry of Love, has continued to resist. Stubbornly he insists that Big Brother cannot dictate reality, that 2 + 2 still equals 4, and that he will stand by his fellow conspirator, Julia, until the end. Then O’Brien, arm of the totalitarian state, confronts Winston with his greatest fear:

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then--no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just ONE person to whom he could transfer his punishment--ONE body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'

He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars--always away, away, away from the rats. He was light years distant, but O'Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.

The chapter ends here, and the Winston Smith we see on the other side of that chapter break has been utterly changed. All the resistance has gone out of him. Although he has memories of the events of his prior life, he calls them “false.” When he sees Julia again, they reflect on the thoroughness of the change they have each experienced:

'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.'

'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.

'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any longer.'

'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.'

The psychological torture that Winston and Julia experience is trauma far beyond the ordinary. And there is no doubt that the utterly sudden and complete change in his characters helps Orwell to underscore his point about the indomitability of totalitarian governments.

People change slowly, and incompletely

Yet in my experience, such sudden and complete change is far from the norm. In most parts of life, the continuities in ourselves are stronger. Change comes in oscillating tendencies, when we sometimes feel one way, sometimes another, and gradually one becomes more powerful and frequent, but our old beliefs and habits don’t necessarily leave us in a moment’s realization.

I think of students that I see developing during their two years here at our school. I think of students I have seen facing great challenges of mental health, self-efficacy, working to build positive habits, working to improve their relationships with their parents and classmates. I have seen so much growth, and I have seen students for whom things turned dark and grim. Yet a common feature in my experience has been that the trajectory is rarely stable. I think of young people I work with who are facing mental health challenges. Sometimes they have a good day, a good week, a good semester. Sometimes, and it can be moment to moment or at a longer stretch, the pain rears up in them, and the beliefs they have worked through counseling to build about themselves seem paper-thin.

Fiction so often oversimplifies these trajectories. I think here of what continues to be my favorite novel of all time The Color Purple, which I see as the greatest story of healing and human strength I have ever encountered. And no one would call the change in Celie sudden. It takes her a whole life long. And yet what I notice too, is that Celie never seems to backslide. The growth she shows, she holds tight to it. It is the raft that ferries her to the next level of development. And in life, I don’t think we always or even usually grow this way. We take steps forward, we fall back, we keep going, we get lost–the journey is circuitous, and even the idea of calling it a journey implies a goal or endpoint, that we have moved somewhere. That’s an assumption that does not always hold.

I am guilty of this way of writing myself. I think we all are, because the structure of a story in our culture in a sense demands it. It feels unsatisfying to rehash in a story a struggle that was already faced five chapters ago and redo it from the ground up, even though that is what often happens in our real minds. It feels repetitive, eye-rolling, and boring. The streamlined trajectory wins out.

A year ago, I read Neal Shusterman’s Challenger Deep, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2015. Shusterman’s novel follows a teenager with schizophrenia, and the protagonist Caden slowly develops his struggle in the real world of a psychiatric hospital and his invented world aboard a sailing ship under a sadistic captain. As Caden receives therapy and medication, his condition worsens and worsens, until he begins to find ways he can control his situation. Gradually, Caden returns to the world. The novel ends hopeful, although Shusterman shows through other characters and through Caden’s own reflections that this recovery is likely not permanent, that his struggle may be ongoing, that he may return to the hospital. I thought this aspect of the novel was a really important one for this topic in particular, to challenge cultural perceptions of mental health, that its trajectory is smooth and assured.

Yet even here, when we map the novel’s plot, it nevertheless follows the same structure (albeit hopeful rather than disheartening) as 1984: Caden’s situation grows worse and worse, and then through a climactic confrontation in his own mind, he is able to emerge, slowly, weak, fearing the monsters will return, and yet we as readers feel the relief of escaped danger. The form of the novel itself carries this meaning: we know that when we reach the end, the conflict, at least to the extent that it concerns us, is at an end. So Shusterman does good work to subvert the narrative of unambiguous recovery; at the same time, he relies on that very narrative for the novel’s success. This Catch-22 is what we writers who want to show the world as close to reality as it can be–this is what we must contend with.

Ways forward

I wonder if the novel has to be this way. Interestingly, I think the short story and flash fiction may have some answers for us here, because by their compressed nature, these forms usually shows us a brief span of time. At least in the case of flash fiction, there is no expectation of clear resolution, which is what drives the novel to solve its conflict. Yet of course, what we love about the novel is its expansiveness, its development, things that shorter forms simply cannot achieve.

I wonder about forms in other literary traditions. Beyond Western literature, are there answers to this question of sudden, irrevocable change, of calcified resolution? I’m continuing to expand my reading. Along with consciously choosing writers of color, female writers, and writers of other marginalized identities, I’m also trying to read more fiction from outside the West. I’m currently working through an anthology, African Short Stories, which I am finding fascinating, trying to inhabit other ways of engaging with the world and engaging with stories.

Perhaps too, I am too focused on this idea of verisimilitude. Perhaps stories’ power lies in their ability to challenge reality, to motivate us towards real change, even if that change indeed might not come suddenly or completely, but to spur us on in that direction. The idea that the trajectories of our lives are messy, that can be disheartening. If stories are to lift us up, maybe they need to show us the ideal rather than the real, to make sense of the jumble rather than just pour the jumble back down our throats. That perhaps we go to a story for the very simplification, the very exposing of the red thread that connects all the aspects of our lives that is difficult to discern in reality’s multitude.

What do you think about this question? I’m curious to hear. I’m curious to keep thinking.

Best wishes for the week ahead,
Jimmy