Everyday Canvas

A Fictional Character Can Change through Rebirth

During my much younger days, when I was rocking colicky babies while watching daytime soaps and trying not to gag over the sentimentality, dead characters suddenly used to show up alive on the TV screen. I had always wondered about the gall those writers had to shock the viewers like that, and I am not even talking about Dark Shadows, either. This used to happen in realistic love stories…a lot!

Come to think of it, a character’s death and rebirth is a powerful motif, especially if the character is the protagonist. The character may physically die, of course, like in the soaps that I mentioned in the above paragraph whose previous death is usually explained or altered through some ad-lib reasoning, but another kind of death and rebirth may take place in other ways as well and more effectively. This is because the character changes dramatically as to his own self-image and the way others see him. Usually, the more positive the change, the more pleased are the readers. Think of Star Wars. Luke Skywalker’s father turns out to be a fallen Jedi who later kills Obi Wan Kenobi who later turns up as a spirit. Not each character goes through such a drastic change. Some changes are subtler such as in Jennie, Jamie’s sister in the Outlander series's eighth book, Written in My Own Heart's Blood. She turns into a sweeter, more accepting kind of a person after her husband Ian’s death.

Sometimes a protagonist dies and is reborn in order to be able to confront a gigantic problem or a formidable villain. At other times, the confrontation with the villain is a duel for a second death. He can also die, so the others can take up the slack left by his absence. Although rare, it is possible for a character to experience more than one death and rebirth experience, be it physical, psychological, or spiritual. What’s more, after he dies and comes back, his return may be short-lived or not. Yet, however he dies, the character is a changed person when he comes back to live inside or away from his old community. In that case, the adjustments of the hero and the community or the second setting or society will be markedly different.

In this way, fiction imitates real life. Whether the character is tragic or comic, he can change and adjust better or worse after going through a life-altering experience. Like the rest of us.