Change is often at the heart of any good story or novel. We yearn for change, I think, and we want to see it reflected in what we read.
Many beginning writers are taught that a character must exhibit change over the course of a story. By the end, the character should be different in some way from the character that we meet at the start. This has been the doctrine for a long time: Artistotle certainly championed it. An epiphanic ending seems, to me, to be a slight variation on this: the character may not fully embrace change, but certainly the character will understand something differently, and the implication often is that this new understanding will lead to change.
It’s taken me a long time to think this through, but I think the focus on character change is not quite accurate. We do want change, but that change doesn’t have to present itself in the character; it’s better, actually, when the change happens within the reader. Jim Shepard, in an essay in Bringing the Devil to His Knees, says this far more eloquently than I ever could:
“..a short story, by definition, does have a responsibility, in its closing gestures, to enlarge our understanding, but it seems to be increasingly difficult for writers to resist allowing their hapless protagonist a new understanding as well—an understanding that will set him or her on the path to a more actualized life…It’s not our task, though, to save our characters, however adorable we secretly find them. We should not, in other words, be afraid to withhold consolation.”
I like Shepard’s advice not to save our characters—I definitely feel that urge when I write, and it’s been extremely helpful for me to think about this as I both write and read.
One of my favorite short stories is “A Day” by William Trevor. It’s included in his collection After Rain, it’s in The Collected Stories, and you can also listen to Jhumpa Lahiri read it on the The New Yorker podcast. Trevor—who never fussed over his titles—named this story for what it is: a day in the life of Mrs. Lethwes. At the start, she is in bed, waking up. At the end, her day is done, and she is heading back to where she started. We see her move through her day; we have access to her thoughts and imaginings; we hear stories from her past.
The beauty of this story, for me, is the circular structure. The story starts and ends in bed; there is no reason to believe that the following day will be any different from this day. The end is connected to the beginning, the beginning is connected to the end. There is no true forward momentum. The story is written in present tense, which heightens the sense of stasis, of being in the moment. It is incredibly sad to realize that this is now Mrs. Lethwes’s life. And therein lies the change: it is our realization that she cannot change, that she is somehow stuck in this day, in this life. And the implication for the reader dawns out of this understanding, too: are we, also, somehow stuck in our lives? Is there a way that we resemble Mrs. Lethwes?
While most Trevor stories do not have this circular structure, his stories often end in a way that the reader is the one who is changed. Sometimes his characters have epiphanies, or something shifts in their lives, but not always. He is often writing about characters who struggle to understand themselves, characters who are stuck in bad situations. By the end, though, it is the reader who understands something in a way that they didn’t at the start, whether or not the character has reached a similar understanding. It is the reader’s knowledge of the world that has changed in some fundamental way.
Claire Keegan’s work also exemplifies this idea of allowing the reader to be the one to inhabit change. In her case, though, she often does end with a change for the character, but she asks, I think, that the reader question that change. Without spoiling Small Things Like These, for those who haven’t read it—and you should!—Bill Furlong makes an enormous decision right at the end of the book. When I first read the novel, I saw this as an act of grace, and I still think it is. But as I have reread the book, as I have thought about it over time, I have come to realize that the implications for this decision are not good: he has most likely made a mess of things by acting, by making a bold choice. And that, I think, is what Keegan wants us to be left with: not the change, per se, but the imagined aftermath, even when, or especially when, the intentions were all good.
I have often found it difficult to implement this in my work—my fallback position is to think about the relationship between a character and change. But I find if I focus, instead, on the effect the story will have on the reader, that’s a good way to move away from character and toward something that may resonate more deeply. And to remember, I think, that if I come to understand something fundamental, or if I see something in a different way, then it is very likely that the reader will feel that as well.
It seems that the only way to end a piece about change is to end with David Bowie, that wonderful, stuttering, opening line of the refrain.
See you in two weeks.