Characters That Don't Change: Verne's Adventurers

It is a given in classical narration that the main characters will undergo some type of change. They will grow and develop and rejoice or despair and sink into disillusionment. They are occupants of Dante's circles, products of what they strove to become in the mortal realm. 

I more or less agree with the need for characters to change. 

There are, however, characters who remain entirely what the author established them to be. Verne's characters fall into this category. 

I write elsewhere how Jules Verne and H.G. Wells represent the two sides of the sci-fi genre. Verne belongs to the older side which focused on the world and discoveries around the characters. Wells, a decade after Verne's Journey, uses a modern approach with War of the Worlds, not only through first-person narration but through a detailed examination of the narrator's emotional state. 

When Verne is put to film, however, the need for character change quite literally enters the picture. The Brendan Fraser version of Journey to the Center of the Earth provides a character searching for his parents and then having to deal with their loss. The 1959 version provides a villain and a romance as the main character, Lindenbrook played by James Mason, becomes more and more disheveled. 

Nearly every 20,000 Leagues' version stresses the choice Aronnax has to make between Ned and Nemo; in fairness to Verne, that choice is given space within the book; it just isn't as important as all the *wow* stuff Nemo drives his submarine through and around. 

The differences indicate several points: 

(1) film goers are products of a modern age that wants character development; we want more than simply a series of images or visual extravaganzas; 

(2) a liking for extravaganza lingers, however; a film that introduces us to an amazing world goes a long way to satisfying our desires--Jackson's Tolkien's films are some of the few I went to the theater to watch (rather than waiting for the DVDs) since I wanted to SEE big Middle-Earth; 

(3) nevertheless, a film requires story in a way that a book does not; I suggest one reason the book does not is not because people don't want characters to grow and change but because reading between the lines enables readers to identify characters with stories and personalities beyond what shows up on the page. 

Static characters have their place. But generally speaking, current writers need to know how to give weaknesses to characters over which the characters will stumble or conquer. Classic literature requires that writing skill.