From Quest to Responsibility: Psychological Becoming in Paulo Coelho’s Fictional Journeys

Abstract

This article examines psychological becoming in the fiction of Paulo Coelho, attending to how inner transformation is shaped through moments of crisis, rupture, and responsibility rather than through spiritual affirmation or inspirational closure. Instead of treating belief as a solution, the analysis follows the narrative pressures under which change becomes unavoidable. Working within a narrative–psychological orientation, the study reads Aleph, Veronika Decides to Die, and The Pilgrimage as texts that place trauma, mortality, fear, and failure at the centre of inner movement.

Through close engagement with particular narrative moments, the article suggests that Coelho’s fictional journeys operate as spaces of psychological exposure. Characters are not rewarded for faith so much as compelled to face unresolved memory, emotional numbing, and forms of inner resistance they can no longer bypass. In Aleph, repetition and traumatic recall press guilt into the present, making integration unavoidable rather than symbolic. In Veronika Decides to Die, sustained proximity to death reactivates affect and alters perception, not through revelation but through enforced attentiveness to life. In The Pilgrimage, discipline, correction, and delay work against fear, gradually stabilizing the self through practice rather than insight.

Although the novels differ in tone and narrative pressure, they move toward a shared condition: psychological responsibility understood as the capacity to acknowledge, endure, and integrate disruptive inner experience without transcendence. By redirecting critical attention away from symbolism and overt spirituality toward inner process, the article unsettles reductive readings of Coelho’s fiction. It argues that these narratives offer a sustained exploration of psychological becoming in which responsibility, rather than aspiration, marks the destination of the journey.