Are characters sharks?

 

I can't help it. I keep changing little things, adding little things to this manuscript, even as I present it to agents as a completed work. This is a little passage I added last night:

"How do you...how do you know you're not a character?"

"Oh, that's depressingly easy, my dear. Just look back on all those boring, meaningless moments, whole days that dragged away. Characters never experience that. They're sharks, always moving forward."

And I thought, hey, that's profound. But ... do I believe it. And is it true? (Which I will admit are not always the same thing.) 

I should preface this by saying the manuscript in question, Six Characters in Search of a Killer, is one in which fictional characters brush up against real human beings (who are also, of course, fictional characters when seen from the vantage point of the real world). 

Now:

Taking the passage at face value, it seems obviously true. A character, or at least a protagonist, is always marching toward a goal, even is that goal is simply the end of the story--the vanishing point on which our sensibilities are trained. This is true even for characters with negative goals, such as Bartleby the Scrivener or Gregor Samsa, both of whom are hurtling headlong toward their doom, because neither can exist in the world of their respective stories. 

A good story, like a good joke, always moves forward, always cuts to the chase. If we must include those moments, days or years when seemingly nothing happens, we have a handy-dandy economical expression:

Time passed.

It's not always true of secondary characters, at first glance. Dickens is the master of such seemingly immobile characters as Mr. Micawber, trapped in caricature as surely as in carbonite. But even for Micawber, something turns up.

And this does not mean that the protagonist moves in a straight line toward their goal. The great art of the writer is in delay and obstruction. The patron saint of novelists is Lucy Van Pelt. Or possibly Scheherazade.

But even though the shark may be circling the Orca over and over endlessly, he still moves forward.

If this is true, then story can be seen as an obstacle course race as the character sprints toward a goal (which can be blocked out as a series of goals, the first of which may well be finding out what the goal is).

None of this is original thinking (although it may be an original metaphor) but it is a timely reminder.

Or is it? Can you think of any novels which belie this dictum? Lay it on me.