The Evolution of Character
Annelise Keirsten-Wakefield on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan
Character arcs — the growth or change that a character goes through in order to overcome their internal and external obstacles — are as important to story as the exterior plot. Stagnant characters can become boring. Satisfying character-development is compelling. In her fantasy novel The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K Le Guin predominantly deals with the evolution of the main character, Tenar, who has been taken from her family as a child, ‘eaten’ by the Nameless Ones and renamed Arha, the priestess of the tombs, and whose worldview changes significantly throughout the story.
At the start of the story, Le Guin portrays Tenar/Arha as proud and insensitive.
Those I serve look after me. I please them; I need please nobody else … I am the One Priestess.
When her servant, Penthe, is whipped after Tenar convinces her to abandon her chores, Tenar is unsympathetic. She is preoccupied with proving herself. When prisoners are brought to the labyrinth to be executed, she condemns them to starve, and though she has nightmares about their deaths she still desires the approval of the priestesses.
She thought many times about what kind of death she should command for the next set of prisoners, more elaborate, better suited to the rituals of the empty throne.
Le Guin makes it difficult for Tenar to grow as a character, situating her in an isolated world of religious dogma. By setting the story in the middle of a desert ‘guarded and defended by emptiness, by solitude’, Le Guin ensures that Tenar’s world is insular and rigid.
She was not accustomed to thinking about things changing, old ways dying and new ones arising. She did not find it comfortable to look at things in that light.
However, two characters act as catalysts for Tenar’s transformation. She first realises ‘how very different people were, how differently they saw life’ when Penthe reveals her indifference towards the Nameless Ones. Though Tenar is ‘scared by the solidity of Penthe’s unfaith’, it causes her to question her beliefs and consider ‘a whole new planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window, an entirely strange world, one in which the gods did not matter’.
Later we see the first true signs of Tenar’s changing attitudes when Ged’s character is introduced. Though she previously sentenced three men to die, when Ged is trapped in the Labyrinth she grapples with her guilt.
He would have nothing for warmth in that dank vault but his own short cloak, no bed but the dusty stone. A cold grave, a cold grave, she thought miserably.
Her character-arc comes to a climax when Ged forces her to choose between the doctrines she has been taught (and the person she was at the start of the story) or the freedom of abandoning her role (becoming the person she has been evolving towards). He tells her …
You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.
By the end of the story, Tenar’s character-arc is complete, and she is ‘truly reborn’, described in the last line of the book as ‘a child coming home’.
The Tombs of Atuan has made me aware that I try to create characters who are too perfect, which usually results in bland, morally superior characters who do not undergo any significant change. Le Guin’s writing has helped me realise that I must allow my characters to be flawed, to be human, because the internal journey is just as important as the physical one.
