In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, discover their nakedness, and are driven from the Garden of Eden. What had been their home becomes a place they can never return to. The world outside the garden is one of suffering and death, and their newfound knowledge offers little consolation for what they have lost. For thousands of years, writers have returned to variations of this story, fascinated by the moment when a person crosses some invisible boundary and finds that the old life is no longer available.
The fall from grace is among our oldest story types. Its central movement is familiar: a character begins in a condition of innocence, security, or belonging, commits some transgression or undergoes a painful revelation, and subsequently loses their place in the world. The circumstances differ widely from one story to another. The fallen character might be a king, a criminal, a child, or an ordinary person whose understanding of themselves has been destroyed. What these stories share is a preoccupation with irreversible change.
Ancient mythology is full of such expulsions and transformations. In Hesiod's account of Pandora, the opening of a jar releases suffering into the human world, leaving hope behind. Pandora's action has consequences far beyond anything she could have anticipated, although her apparent transgression is itself part of a scheme devised by Zeus. The myth complicates the question of responsibility: Pandora appears to bring about humanity's suffering, yet the conditions for her mistake were established by forces beyond her control.
The same uncertainty surrounding who is at fault has fascinated later writers. In Paradise Lost, John Milton revisits the biblical fall and grants Adam, Eve, and Satan elaborate psychological lives. Eve's desire for knowledge, in particular, arises from recognizable human impulses. Her curiosity and ambition make her susceptible to temptation, and Milton allows readers to follow the reasoning through which she comes to justify her decision. The catastrophe grows out of desires that, under other circumstances, might have served her well.
This is worth considering when developing a fallen protagonist. A character who destroys their life through some obvious vice may offer limited opportunities for psychological exploration. A more interesting possibility is that the character's downfall grows from a quality they have always considered admirable. For example, a fiercely loyal person may become complicit in another's cruelty, or an ambitious artist may sacrifice their closest relationships in pursuit of recognition. Such characters need never make a single decision that appears monstrous in isolation. Their ruin can develop through an accumulation of choices, each one reasonable enough in the moment.
The fall from grace has survived into contemporary fiction partly because the paradise from which a character is expelled can take so many forms. In Ian McEwan's Atonement, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis possesses a lively imagination and an incomplete understanding of the adult world. When she misinterprets a series of encounters involving her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, she makes an accusation whose consequences extend across several lives. Her childhood confidence in her ability to understand and organize events becomes the instrument of her greatest mistake.
McEwan's novel is especially interesting because Briony's fall also raises questions about the possibility of redemption. As an adult, she attempts to reckon with the consequences of her actions through writing. But the novel remains suspicious of the novelist's power to repair the damage in the real world. Briony can rearrange events on the page, give people the endings she wishes they had received, and imagine the forgiveness she longs for. But none of these acts can restore what was lost.
Donna Tartt approaches the archetype differently in The Secret History. Richard Papen arrives at a small Vermont college and becomes infatuated with a group of classics students whose wealth, intelligence, and cultivated eccentricities seem to promise entry into a more beautiful existence. He gradually discovers the violence and moral corruption beneath their intellectual sophistication, but by then his longing to belong has drawn him into their crimes.
Richard's tragedy depends on the seductive quality of the world he enters. Tartt spends considerable time establishing its atmosphere, allowing readers to understand why he finds it irresistible. The eventual disillusionment matters because the reader has experienced something of the original enchantment. In this respect, the novel offers a valuable lesson about pacing. Before a writer can convincingly portray the loss of paradise, that paradise must have some substance in the reader's imagination.
Writers working with this structure would do well to begin by considering what their protagonist stands to lose. The answer may be a home, a marriage, a friendship, a faith, or a sense of personal innocence. It might also be something the character possesses without realizing its importance. A person who has always enjoyed the unquestioning affection of a family, for instance, may discover its value only after doing something that places it in jeopardy.
Because the fall from grace involves changes in both circumstance and consciousness, it can present particular challenges during the writing process. A novel writing coach can help an author trace the decisions through which a protagonist moves toward ruin, looking for places where the progression feels rushed, unconvincing, or overly predetermined. In a novel built around gradual corruption, seemingly minor decisions may deserve as much attention as the final catastrophe. The coach can also help the writer establish the protagonist's original world with sufficient richness that its destruction carries emotional weight.
There is a reason the story of Eden ends with Adam and Eve leaving the garden rather than with their deaths. Expulsion leaves them with an entire life to endure. The gates have closed behind them, but the world continues, and they must discover how to inhabit it. The same possibility gives the fall from grace much of its literary power. A character who has lost their innocence, their home, or their understanding of themselves must still decide what to do the following morning. What they make of that diminished world may prove as revealing as the mistake that brought them there.
