At the beginning of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, the title character is lying in bed. He has letters to answe and an estate to manage, but none of these concerns seems quite pressing enough to justify getting dressed. Visitors come and go, bringing news of their activities, their ambitions, their busy lives. Oblomov listens, occasionally expresses an intention to do something himself, and continues lying down. By the time the reader has spent a hundred pages in his company, it has become apparent that getting out of bed may be the central challenge of his existence.
Published in 1859, Oblomov is an early and particularly entertaining example of a novel organized around a protagonist's resistance to change. Oblomov is intelligent, affectionate, and capable of recognizing his own shortcomings. He can even imagine the sort of life he might lead if he could overcome his inertia. Yet his resolutions rarely survive contact with the smallest inconvenience. His friend Stolz attempts to draw him into society, while his romance with Olga briefly promises a more substantial transformation. Neither intervention succeeds in rescuing him from his habits.
Most readers are accustomed to watching fictional characters undergo some process of development. Goncharov, however, is interested in the peculiar tenacity of human habits. Oblomov's inability to act becomes increasingly consequential as opportunities pass him by. The reader can see the shape of another life waiting for him, which makes his repeated retreats all the more painful.
There is considerable comedy in this predicament. Oblomov's elaborate postponements, his irritation with the demands of ordinary existence, and his extraordinary talent for rationalization are funny because they are recognizable. Most people have experienced the temptation to defer an unpleasant obligation. Goncharov carries this impulse to an absurd extreme, allowing an ordinary weakness to govern the course of an entire life.
A novelist can also construct such a character through relentless activity. Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, published in 1913, follows Undine Spragg, a young woman whose determination to rise through the ranks of fashionable society leads her through a succession of marriages, disappointments, and social triumphs. Undine possesses nearly inexhaustible energy. She is forever pursuing some new opportunity, acquiring fashionable possessions, or arranging her circumstances to secure greater admiration.
What she lacks is any inclination to reconsider the desires that govern her life. Every achievement briefly satisfies her before revealing some further advantage she has yet to obtain. Wharton follows Undine through dramatically changing circumstances, while allowing her essential character to remain remarkably consistent. The reader gradually comes to recognize the futility of her ambitions, even as Undine herself remains convinced that happiness lies just beyond her latest success.
Wharton's approach offers an important lesson for writers attempting to sustain a narrative around an unchanging protagonist. Undine's ambitions produce a continuous succession of conflicts, each involving new people and different social circumstances. Her behavior may be predictable, but its consequences are rarely dull. Indeed, much of the novel's pleasure comes from watching how far her appetites will carry her, and wondering who will suffer for them next.
A more unsettling variation appears in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea. Its narrator, Charles Arrowby, is a retired theater director who has withdrawn to a house on the English coast, intending to devote himself to solitude and contemplation. He describes his meals, his daily routines, and his surroundings with an attention that initially makes his retirement seem almost idyllic. Then he encounters Hartley, a woman he loved decades earlier, and becomes convinced that their relationship must be revived.
Charles's recollections of their youthful romance gradually overwhelm his understanding of the present. He interprets Hartley's reluctance as evidence of hidden affection and her unhappy circumstances as proof that she needs rescuing. Other people repeatedly challenge his interpretation, but Charles has spent a lifetime directing actors, manipulating appearances, and arranging human relationships according to his own intentions. He approaches the people around him as though they were participants in a drama he alone understands.
Murdoch allows the reader to inhabit this self-deception at considerable length. Charles's elaborate explanations become increasingly difficult to accept, and yet the intimacy of his narration makes it possible to understand how thoroughly he believes them. His inability to recognize another person's independent existence becomes the source of both the novel's comedy and its cruelty.
For writers, the chief difficulty with such protagonists is maintaining the reader's interest in behavior that may become repetitive. A character who refuses to change still needs to encounter situations that challenge their established understanding of the world. Oblomov falls in love. Undine marries and remarries. Charles finds his carefully arranged solitude invaded by the past. Each event offers an opportunity to reconsider old assumptions, and each refusal carries consequences.
These novels also demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between what a character knows and what they can bring themselves to acknowledge. Oblomov understands his inactivity perfectly well, at least in moments of unusual clarity. Charles possesses extraordinary powers of observation when describing matters that do not threaten his self-image. A protagonist may be quite perceptive in one area of life while remaining almost willfully blind in another. Such contradictions can give an otherwise frustrating character considerable depth.
Working with a literary coach can be useful when developing a novel along these lines, particularly because many familiar models of narrative structure assume that characters must grow or achieve some decisive revelation. A coach can help a writer explore other possibilities for organizing the manuscript, examining the changing circumstances, relationships, and consequences that give the story its momentum. Where a conventional character arc might culminate in an act of recognition, a novel about resistance may depend on a succession of missed opportunities.
During revision, a coach can help identify passages in which a character's behavior has become monotonous, or moments when an apparent change of heart feels unearned. Sometimes the solution involves introducing a new conflict; elsewhere, the writer may need to grant the character a temporary insight or an unexpected moment of vulnerability. The aim is to make each return to familiar behavior feel consequential, as though something has been lost in the process.
One of the saddest moments in Oblomov comes from the recognition that its protagonist might have lived differently. He possesses enough intelligence and tenderness to imagine a fuller existence, and for a time it seems possible that love might draw him toward it. His failure feels particularly human because the obstacles are so ordinary. He cannot make himself endure the discomfort of becoming someone else.
Perhaps this accounts for the lasting appeal of characters who refuse to change. Their stories expose the strange distance between understanding our weaknesses and overcoming them. Readers may recognize a character's mistakes almost immediately, and spend the remainder of the novel hoping for a revelation that never arrives. Oblomov remains Oblomov, despite everything that might have made him otherwise. The life he could have lived gradually recedes, until all that remains is the life he has chosen.
