Character arcs are incredibly personal and this is what makes them so compelling. Character arcs in literature are the backbone from which the story guides itself. They bring liveliness and warmth to their world, bringing the reader closer to the character in question and create a growing affection towards them as the pages are turned. Character arcs come in various shapes and forms but it is the detail and precision within their story that makes a made-up persona so fascinating.
Fiction as a genre provides an infinity of stories from an overwhelming number of imaginations. These stories can almost always be categorised into certain character arc tropes: moral ascending, moral descending, transformational and flat.
The moral ascending character will fight and arise from its weaknesses or obstacles into becoming a better person than where they started from. The moral descending character will, on the contrary, keep making decisions that will only cause them to spiral further and further down. This can be a tragic or comedic take, depending on the writer’s viewpoint. The transformational character arc is often seen in heroic novels or plays, which feature characters who make a dramatic (and sometimes unrealistic) change within themselves or their lives from the beginning to the end of a story. Finally, the flat character arc, as the name suggests, is a character who goes through no personal development whatsoever. These characters usually belong in either mystery or adventure fiction, where the plot is more centred around the character’s surroundings rather than their personal development.
Growth is a core aspect of these stories, whether it is upwards, stagnated or takes a leap only to fall back to the beginning. This transformation, whichever direction it takes, makes the character arc all the more compelling.
One literature genre where growth fulfils a main role would be the coming-of-age-story, or Bildungsroman. These stories tend to focus on the interrelation between the physical and emotional aspects of growing up. This can be shown in many ways: from becoming a teenager, adult or senior; to the growth of the self or the process of maturing, which can happen in any given moment of life. These are the stories that never fail to grasp our hearts in some way or another.
A quintessential example of a coming-of-age story is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This classic centered around racial prejudice and social injustice is also a powerful insight into the challenges of growing up, encompassing themes such as loss of innocence, gender norms or expectations and the crushing yet necessary experience of
realizing the evil means of the world. These themes are explored mainly through six-year-old (eight by the end of the novel) protagonist and narrator Scout Finch. They bring not only important conversation to the table, but are also relatable to practically everyone in some way. The loss of innocence, which can go hand in hand with the realization of evil, is a turning point in life we have all taken. Reading such a novel, written from a child’s perspective in later stages of life can imitate that growing up process by rekindling our love for beauty and innocence, only to later on create a sense of nostalgia and loss for something we had already left behind long ago. Although the novel is set in 1930s Alabama, tackling gender norms that exist from a young age is still a relevant issue today and something that we all have to battle to a lesser or greater extent at a moment in our lives. Experiencing this from a six-year-old’s perspective captures the essence of heartbreak that coming-of-age stories are supposed to evoke.
The necessity of growing up is a painful rite of transformation. This is as true in novels as it is in real life, which if embodied with the appropriate sensitivity, makes a character captivating to the reader’s eyes without fail. This character arc can fluctuate depending on the narrative although sometimes it can be hard to see as an absorbed reader from close up. Growing up requires you to face challenges no one can prepare you for, which makes reading from the unknown of someone’s perspective a heart-warming yet stirring experience. This might be because as daunting as growing up can be, there is an undeniable comfort in finding from literature the beauty of its inevitability.
“Story” by rossyyume is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0