If you’re an editor or a creative writing instructor you run into this one on the regular. I received a good example a few weeks ago from a student, who had written what was otherwise a very solid story. There was a compelling conflict with tightly-wrought scenes, the world and the secondary characters were well-drawn and believable — but the story’s protagonist was off. Which was strange. On paper the protagonist seemed to be the perfect person for this particular story, and as the narrative focal point they did a commendable job reporting on everything happening around them, a commendable job evoking the storyworld.
What was missing, paradoxically enough, was the protagonist themselves. I mean, the protagonist was there in every scene, reporting tirelessly on the world and the other characters — but they were also emphatically not there. Despite the considerable amount of narrative work the protagonist was doing, all the words they were expending on the world outside, they never once said a word about themselves, about who they were or what they were experiencing.
Which meant the protagonist, for all their bona fides, never truly came into focus, never came to life, never gave us readers anything to connect with. There was a character-shaped hole in the narrative, an absence signifying, if not nothing, then very close to nothing.
Normally you’d fix this absence by filling up the character — adding a want or a contradiction or friends, or one of the Invincible Channels — but weirdly enough the protagonist’s lack of character seemed profoundly structural, extending beyond the character themselves. Something deep was at work here that was jamming the character’s character-ness.
So what was happening?