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Thank you Scott, great article! Would it be a bad idea to take my time up to page 75 and then make the Unconscious Goal obvious to the reader? What if the audience doesn't know until the end of the movie, what the protagonists Unconscious Goal is? And (to make it even worse), what if the Protagonist himself doesn't know it until then? That really bugs me...

Metamorphosis is an apt word for the moral growth process that a character can undergo in the course of a story. There is at least one situation where that process can motivate a character to completely flip on his original objective goal and the audience will accept the 180 -- even applaud it. And that is when the original objective goal is manifestly the wrong goal. In "Schindler's List", the title character's original objective goal is to make money, lots of money, using Jewish slave labor in World War II. And he does make lots of money. But the metamorphosis of his character, his moral development, impels him to reverses goals and spend his entire fortune to save the lives of the Jews whose labor he has exploited. In "Casablanca", Rick Blaine's objective goal is to look out for #1, himself, to not to get involved in the resistance against the Nazis. "I stick my neck out for nobody." By eventually, his character metamorphosis causes him to stick his neck out for the sake of a cause greater than himself, more noble than his own selfish interests. As with Schindler, Rick must pay a steep price for doing the right thing. Not in money but in love: he must sacrifice his relationship with Ilsa. On the other hand, it's the beginning of a beautiful relationship with Captain Renault and the resistance.

And then there's the wonderous metamorphosis of the Stasi agent in "The Lives of Others". Like the unquestioning and experienced agent he is, he dutifully follows orders to spy upon an East German writer with the objective goal of finding evidence of the writer's disloyalty to the Communist state. When he discovers how corrupt his superiors are and has a moral awakening, he reverses his objective goal and contrives to get ride of the evidence, to save the writer from being arrested.