Successful stories that don't follow the standard story template?
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I'm mulling over a story that doesn't follow the standard story template of:
- Hero (or anti-hero)
- Hero has problem (or is problem)
- Hero fights problem
- Hero succeeds (or problem succeeds and all the permutations and varieties of hero and problem.)
- Hero is transformed. (Or not. Or eaten.)
Are there any stories that successfully break this template? What I'm looking for is not variants on the Hero's Journey where the parts are different or ironic but where the template itself is not used or referenced. The only thing that comes to mind are the existential novels of Camus or Sarte but those are rather depressing.
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That particular structure is called the "Hero's Journey," and yes, there are many stories which aren't.
- 1984, Animal Farm, Death of a Salesman, Brokeback Mountain — look for stories with sad endings, because that often means the hero didn't succeed in overcoming the problem, and wasn't transformed.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is literally a day in the life of a prisoner in a gulag, so there isn't any kind of journey there.
- I realize it's an episode of a TV show and not a novel, but Star Trek: Voyager had a two-parter called "Year of Hell." Alternate timelines were heavily featured. At the end of part two, the Reset Button is hit, and all the alternate timelines are wiped out. The antagonist decides not to start the temporal mucking about, which might sort of qualify as "transformed," but no one remembers the events of the episodes, so no problem is overcome.
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