Unit 3 · Topic 3.2

3.2 Characters who change and characters who don't

Some characters change in important ways over a novel or play; others stay basically the same. A change can be outward, like losing money or health, or inward, like a new way of seeing things, and one often triggers the other. Whether a character changes, and how, often points straight at what the work is saying.

Key terms

dynamic character
static character
character development
round character
flat character
epiphany

Dynamic and static characters

A dynamic character develops over the course of a work: their beliefs, values or understanding change. A static character stays basically the same. "Static" doesn't mean badly written. A character who refuses to change can be just as meaningful as one who grows.

Dynamic characters usually make choices that shape how the story ends. Their change isn't just something that happens to them; it pushes the plot toward its climax or resolution.

Two kinds of change

Change can be outward or inward, and the two often feed each other. A character who loses their fortune may lose their pride too. A character who suddenly sees the truth about their marriage may walk out the door, which is an outward change caused by an inward one.

Kind of change	Examples	Question to ask
Outward (external)	Gaining or losing money, health, a home, a job, a reputation	How does this visible change affect how the character thinks?
Inward (internal)	A new belief, a lost illusion, growing up, a change of heart	What does the character now understand that they didn't before?

Epiphanies

An epiphany is a sudden moment of realization, when a character sees something clearly for the first time. Epiphanies often come near the end of a story. Not every change is sudden, though; some characters change slowly across hundreds of pages.

Round and flat characters

You may also hear "round" and "flat." A round character is complex and believable, with mixed traits. A flat character is built around one or two traits. These terms describe depth, not change: a round character can be static, and a flat character can serve an important purpose, such as highlighting someone else.

Why change matters for meaning

When a character changes, ask what caused the change and what they learned. When a character doesn't change despite everything, ask what that refusal shows. The contrast between a changing character and an unchanging one is often where a work's argument lives.

Worked examples

Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.

Example 1
A change that one character makes and another can't
In Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879; translated by R. Farquharson Sharp), Nora has spent the play acting as her husband Torvald Helmer's cheerful, obedient wife, while secretly having borrowed money to save his health. Near the end, she tells him: "I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls." Helmer answers: "There is some truth in what you say—exaggerated and strained as your view of it is. But for the future it shall be different. Playtime shall be over, and lesson-time shall begin." Explain what this exchange shows about which character has changed.
Show the solutionHide the solution
1. Step 1: Look at Nora's metaphor. "Doll-wife" and "doll-child" show she now sees her whole life as being played with, never treated as an adult. That's an inward change: a new understanding.
2. Step 2: Notice the chain: she was a doll to her father, then to her husband, and she has treated her children the same way. She sees the pattern for the first time.
3. Step 3: Look at Helmer's reply. He grants "some truth," but promises "lesson-time." He still sees himself as the one in charge of her, now as a teacher instead of a playmate.
4. Step 4: Explain the contrast: Nora is dynamic, Helmer is static, and his failure to change makes her final choice, leaving, feel necessary.
Answer: Model paragraph: In this exchange Ibsen shows that Nora has changed and Torvald hasn't. Nora's metaphor, "your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child," reveals a new understanding: she sees that she has been a plaything all her life, passed from father to husband, and that she has repeated the pattern with her own children. Helmer's reply shows he can't follow her. He admits "some truth" but offers only a new arrangement in which "lesson-time shall begin." Turning from playmate to teacher, he still casts himself as the adult and Nora as the child. Because Helmer stays the same while Nora's understanding changes completely, the play makes her decision to leave feel like the only way her inward change can become a real one.

Common mistakes

Calling a character dynamic just because their situation changes. Ask whether their understanding or values change too.
Treating static characters as unimportant. Their refusal to change often sharpens the meaning of someone else's change.
Mixing up round/flat (how complex a character is) with dynamic/static (whether they change).

On the exam

Literary argument prompts often ask about how a character changes or what a change reveals. A character whose outward and inward changes connect gives you plenty to write about.
In multiple choice, questions may ask how a character's view of something has shifted between two passages. Compare their words before and after.

Connected topics

Videos

Learn Literary Character Types Using TV and Movie Clips
ELA Through FilmWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Introducing Static and Dynamic Characters
Teaching With PurposeWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Character Types: Flat, Round, Static, and Dynamic
An Open BookWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Reader, it's Jane Eyre - Crash Course Literature 207
CrashCourseWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Dynamic vs. Static Characters (why you need both!)
ReedsyWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Check yourself

4 questions on 3.2 Characters who change and characters who don't. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.

HELMER. How unreasonable and how ungrateful you are, Nora! Have you not been happy here?

NORA. No, I have never been happy. I thought I was, but it has never really been so.

HELMER. Not—not happy!

NORA. No, only merry. And you have always been so kind to me. But our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa’s doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls. I thought it great fun when you played with me, just as they thought it great fun when I played with them. That is what our marriage has been, Torvald.

HELMER. There is some truth in what you say—exaggerated and strained as your view of it is. But for the future it shall be different. Playtime shall be over, and lesson-time shall begin.

NORA. Whose lessons? Mine, or the children’s?

HELMER. Both yours and the children’s, my darling Nora.

NORA. Alas, Torvald, you are not the man to educate me into being a proper wife for you.

HELMER. And you can say that!

NORA. And I—how am I fitted to bring up the children?

HELMER. Nora!

NORA. Didn’t you say so yourself a little while ago—that you dare not trust me to bring them up?

HELMER. In a moment of anger! Why do you pay any heed to that?

NORA. Indeed, you were perfectly right. I am not fit for the task. There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself—you are not the man to help me in that. I must do that for myself. And that is why I am going to leave you now.

HELMER. [springing up]. What do you say?

NORA. I must stand quite alone, if I am to understand myself and everything about me. It is for that reason that I cannot remain with you any longer.

HELMER. Nora, Nora!

NORA. I am going away from here now, at once. I am sure Christine will take me in for the night—

HELMER. You are out of your mind! I won’t allow it! I forbid you!

NORA. It is no use forbidding me anything any longer. I will take with me what belongs to myself. I will take nothing from you, either now or later.

HELMER. What sort of madness is this!

NORA. Tomorrow I shall go home—I mean, to my old home. It will be easiest for me to find something to do there.

HELMER. You blind, foolish woman!

NORA. I must try and get some sense, Torvald.

HELMER. To desert your home, your husband and your children! And you don’t consider what people will say!

NORA. I cannot consider that at all. I only know that it is necessary for me.

HELMER. It’s shocking. This is how you would neglect your most sacred duties.

NORA. What do you consider my most sacred duties?

HELMER. Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children?

NORA. I have other duties just as sacred.

HELMER. That you have not. What duties could those be?

NORA. Duties to myself.

HELMER. Before all else, you are a wife and a mother.

NORA. I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are—or, at all events, that I must try and become one. I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right, and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say, or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House (1879), Act III, translated by R. Farquharson Sharp (1910)

Question 1 of 4

Nora's speeches in the passage show that she has changed from

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line.

“He’s looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that’s twenty-four years ago come next February,” Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses.

The “smash-up” it was—I gathered from the same informant—which, besides drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome’s forehead, had so shortened and warped his right side that it cost him a visible effort to take the few steps from his buggy to the post-office window. He used to drive in from his farm every day at about noon, and as that was my own hour for fetching my mail I often passed him in the porch or stood beside him while we waited on the motions of the distributing hand behind the grating. I noticed that, though he came so punctually, he seldom received anything but a copy of the Bettsbridge Eagle, which he put without a glance into his sagging pocket. At intervals, however, the post-master would hand him an envelope addressed to Mrs. Zenobia—or Mrs. Zeena—Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left-hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the name of his specific. These documents my neighbour would also pocket without a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their number and variety, and would then turn away with a silent nod to the post-master.

“It was a pretty bad smash-up?” I questioned Harmon, looking after Frome’s retreating figure, and thinking how gallantly his lean brown head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape.

“Wust kind,” my informant assented. “More’n enough to kill most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan’ll likely touch a hundred.”

“Good God!” I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after climbing to his seat, had leaned over to assure himself of the security of a wooden box—also with a druggist’s label on it—which he had placed in the back of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably looked when he thought himself alone. “That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!”

Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek. “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn’t ever anybody but Ethan. Fust his father—then his mother—then his wife.”

“And then the smash-up?”

Harmon chuckled sardonically. “That’s so. He had to stay then.”

“I see. And since then they’ve had to care for him?”

Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. “Oh, as to that: I guess it’s always Ethan done the caring.”

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent inferences: “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters.”

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

Question 2 of 4

The narrator's thought of “how gallantly his lean brown head” must once have sat “on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape” (paragraph 6) chiefly emphasizes

It was a random shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities upon his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the “underground pipeline to Canada” attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say.

James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.

I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran College of St. Olaf’s in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter VI

Question 3 of 4

Paragraph 2 marks the start of Gatsby's transformation by

Question 4 of 4

The phrase “to this conception he was faithful to the end” (paragraph 3) suggests that Gatsby

0 of 4 answered