What is a Protagonist in Cli-Fi? Transcript (English Subtitles Available in Video)
By Erika Stewart & Vanessa Garcia Vazquez
MA Student in Literature and Culture & MA Student in Rhetoric and Composition
November 8, 2024
When we think of a protagonist, we often think of a single, central character in a story. As Marisa Williams says in her literary terms video, “The protagonist is the character who drives the action--the character whose fate matters most. In other words, they are involved in —and often central to—the plot or conflict of the story, but are also usually the emotional heart of the narrative.” Take Katniss from The Hunger Games, for example: during the first book, we follow her as she struggles to feed her family, save her sister, and to survive in the games. It is through her own skill and experience that she is able to do these things, and we follow her closely through the story.
This definition works when the central conflict is small enough that an individual can affect it, like the outcome of The Hunger Games, but how does it work in Climate Fiction, or Cli-Fi, when the problem is too big for one protagonist? What happens when the protagonist cannot solve the problem alone or, even, cannot solve the problem at all?
Sometimes, in cli-fi, an individual protagonist does not, and cannot, solve the larger climate issue on any level. In Helen Phillips’s short story, “The Disaster Store,” we follow a mother and her six-year-old daughter, in a future ravaged by climate disaster, as they are on a shopping trip for supplies, preparing for an impending storm. At first, the central problem appears to be this storm. The story opens with the anxiety of preparing for it, and, as an audience, we are used to that kind of plot: something bad is coming, how will our protagonist deal with it?
But, in this story, we never see the storm, or the outcome of it. Instead, the emotional climax of the story comes when the mother realizes that her exhaustion and anxiety has made her callous to her daughter, and they, through a hug, share a moment of reconnection. In this case, the central issue, the storm, cannot be fixed or changed through our protagonist. The only thing that is affected is the personal conflict, the tense relationship between the mother and daughter. The root of the mother’s anxiety, climate collapse and the impending storm, cannot be fixed in this story, as she does not have the power to affect something that massive in scale. We are left only with a temporary decrease in tension in the mother-daughter relationship. In other words, the individual protagonist cannot solve the massive problems presented in cli-fi.
There are some Cli-Fi works, however, where we do see problems of climate disaster remedied on some level. Adam Flynn and Andrew Dana Hudson’s story “Sunshine State” follows a former insurance saleswoman, Ramses, as she is brought in to help support a wetlands restoration project called “The Myth.” There are two large conflicts in this story; one, the conflict between the workers building the Myth and the State that sees the Myth as disruptive, and two, the care of the incoming refugees from a massive storm. We follow the workers of the Myth as they collectively deal with these huge-scale issues, and Ramses, our protagonist, fades into the larger group. She does still have a personal arc, as she becomes less bitter, and more caring, trusting, and hopeful, but this is achieved through her enmeshment with a larger collective. It is only the group, the collective protagonist, that is able to resolve the larger conflict, push out the state military, bring in the refugees from the storm, and sustain their restoration work.
So, in Cli-Fi, when the problems are global in scale, the traditional protagonist is undermined, as one individual cannot be central to the resolution of the effects of climate collapse. Cli-Fi often deals with this in one of two ways. Either, like we see in “The Disaster Store,” the individual protagonist is able to resolve a small, personal issue, but is still unable to change anything at large, or, like we see in “Sunshine State,” the individual protagonist will grow and change in some way, but only the collective protagonist is able to resolve anything related to climate collapse on a larger scale.
Let’s return to the The Hunger Games series. The focus of the conflict in later books moves away from just Katniss and towards the resistance as a whole: what began as her own fight for survival has expanded to the survival of everyone. Even with this shift towards the collective that is working together to take down the capital, our attention still remains on Katniss, as she is the emotional heart of the story. However, because her focus has moved from her own survival to the survival of the districts, the conflict is resolved when the districts win and the capital is overthrown.
From our previous video, “What is cli-fi?”, we know that climate fiction is reflective of real world climate problems, and we, like Katniss, and like cli-fi protagonists, are facing problems that cannot be solved by the individual. This is why Cli-Fi often either ends bleakly, like in “The Disaster Store,” or the protagonist joins a collective protagonist, like in “Sunshine State”, a group who works together to remedy a massive issue. Stories can help us understand the need to join collectives.
We can look at The Hunger Games to see how the presence of a collective protagonist, as opposed to an individual protagonist, might affect how the story is told. What if the protagonist of The Hunger Games were a collective protagonist like District 13, the group that ends up overthrowing the Capitol in the end of the series? What would this alter about the way in which the series was written? What we would gain from having this type of protagonist, and what might we lose? Let us know what you think in the comments in the video!
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Stewart, Erika and Vanessa Garcia Vazquez, "What is a Protagonist in Cli-Fi?" Oregon State Guide to Climate-Change Literature, edited by Rachael Garcia, 8 Nov. 2024, Oregon State University, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-allegory. Accessed [insert date].
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