Is a single main character really important in a novel involving a team effort?
I have had several people ask me who is the main character of my thriller novel. But, the novel involves multiple characters working as a team who rise and fall as the need occurs. At first I thought it doesn't matter if there is a main character in a story about a small group working together. Do the X-men have a main character? Do the Avengers have a main character. How about the Walking Dead? But, my wife pointed out that yes, the Walking Dead do have a main character, it is Rick the sheriff. And thinking more on it I decided the Avengers have a main character also, it is Captain America. Even the X-men has one, the main character that continues even when they are not in the story isn't Dr Xavier, it is Wolverine. Her point is readers expect a main character because they want to know their origins, how their lives evolved to where they are in the story and how the other members feel about them. Too many 'leaders' become too confusing and readers simply lose caring for all the characters.
However, I also challenge the reader to name a single main character from Andromeda Strain or even Jurassic Park. A good editor friend told my my main character is the virus the team is trying to cure. Are the critique and my wife correct? Are main characters essential to both plot and as the anchor for point of view? Or is the foe the main character much like in Jaws or Moby Dick.
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1 answer
You can certainly have an ensemble cast, and you can certainly send a team on a shared quest. Hundreds of novels and movies do exactly that. But while a team can have a shared plot, a plot is not the same thing as a story arc.
A story arc is the difference between a story and a piece of imagined history. It is the emotional lure that attracts the reader to the piece. A story arc is fundamentally moral. It is about how a character responds to a challenge and the price they are willing, or not willing, to pay to achieve their ends. This is a fundamentally moral question. It is not a matter of method, but of values. As such a story arch is fundamentally individual. A character can have a story arc; a team cannot.
If multiple team members go on a quest, either there is one member of the team whose moral arc is the focus of the work, and the others are supporting characters, whose motivations and actions need to be plausible, but do not necessarily need to be fully explored or to reach a moral crisis and resolution; or each (or several) member(s) of the team has a featured moral arc that is fully explored and resolved over the same series of events that mark the plot, meaning that several story arcs are brought to crisis and resolution at the climax of the novel.
The latter, of course, requires considerable coordination, and it is not at all unusual for some of what seemed like promising and interesting story arcs in the development of the story to go unresolved in the end. Often the way you know who the "main character" of a story really is is that their moral arc is the only one that actually gets fully and satisfyingly resolved.
But if you have people asking you who the main character of your novel is, it may well be because they are not finding a moral arc to follow. If they were engaged with a single moral arc, they would not ask the question. And I suspect that if they were truly engaged with multiple moral arcs they would not ask it either, or perhaps only at the end if they found that the more compelling moral arc they had been most invested in turned out never to be fully resolved.
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