Do people change?

Fiction teaches you that people change. History, experience, and poetry all teach you this is a lie.

Mark Winegardner, "The Visiting Poet," That's True of Everybody

Mark Winegardner

In fiction, as in the short story from which the above quotation comes, characters change. Mark Winegardner suggests that that itself is fiction. People don't really change.

Or do they?

Personalities, it seems to me, rarely change, and when they do it is often a matter of concern. Why is this normally placid person suddenly so belligerent? Why is this person, who usually ignores me, suddenly being so nice to me?

But this doesn't mean that real people, like fictional characters, don't sometimes change their minds, often in life-changing ways. Two people who were madly in love when they were married five years ago now can't stand to be in the same room with each other. Some who marched with leftists in their youth become conservatives in middle age.

I think of the Apostle Paul in this context. When he was still called Saul, he persecuted Christians. Then he became the first great Christian missionary. His personality didn't change. The passionate nature that made him so effective when he was stoning Christians to death also made him effective when he started defending Christ.

Personalities rarely change in fiction either, at least not in first-rate fiction. We may remember movie comedies in which a cowardly Bob Hope or Don Knots turns heroic when it comes time to save the girl. In better stories change comes more subtly.

Each of us, at one time or another, makes decisions that change our lives profoundly, and so in a sense change us. We get a job rather than going to college. We get married. We accept one job over another. We may start drinking too much or taking drugs. When we have children, we may become more responsible, more serious about what we do, where we live, how we handle our money.

Real people, like fictional characters, do change, even while staying the same.