Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song” features the hugely successful main character Chris Guthrie,, Chris is a very persuasive character, convincing and believable, She effectively gains the sympathies, through her warm and vital personality and her development throughout the novel.

At the beginning of the novel, Chris is a young girl. She is completely innocent, and unaware of her attitude towards sex; “kissed with her kind , red lips…… it was over in a moment, quick and shameful, fine for all that tingling and strange”. She doesn’t fully understand the appeal of kissing but feels it,
Chris’s sexual development is tracked from her innocent youth, throughout the confusion and experience of adolescence, until her sexual development ends with her marriage to Ewan. During her development she seems to the reader to be reasonable and level headed. She is not affected by the ‘harvest madness’, that causes a wave of sexual activity. It makes her stand out from the rest of the community, her experiences are engaging but not always pleasant, and makes her sexual development realistic and interesting for the reader.

The difference between Chris and the rest of the Kinraddie community in terms of sex continue to illustrate Chris as completely human and real. Her immediate family’s views are distorted concerning sex and she has to struggle to make her own choices; her father is conflicted between sexual desire and the sin of sex and her mother has developed a fear of sex and child birth. Because of her isolation, Gibbons is able to successfuuly explore human experience and sexuality through Chris. The development of mature, fixed views towards sex makes her an attractive character to the reader. Chris is more intelligent than both her parents, Academically she is gifted. However she was born into the peasant way of life and like her mother has a strong emotional connection to the land. ”There are better things than your studies…..there’s the countryside your own, you its, in the days when you are neither bairn nor woman”.
Chris is divided between her parents and this creates internal conflict for her.; between the love of the land and the dying peasant way of life and the educated lifstyle. ”At school they wrote she was the clever one and John Guthrie said she might have the education she needed if she stuck to her lessons…that was fine of father, the Guthrie in her whispered, but the Murdoch laughed with a sweet blithe face”
In the end she chooses the land: she is unable to ignore her emotional connection with the land, and her marriage to Ewan ties her to the peasant lifestyle. Her conflict creates a reflective , appealing character and evokes the reader’s sympathy.

Gibbon’s ‘gossipy’ narrative style creates a fluid storytelling style. This makes Chris’s development process progressive and ever changing. It creates intricate storyline and flows around Chris as the central character. Chris is not static but a vivid and spirited character. The novel is divided into 4 sections,; 4 parts of the farming year. Ploughing, , drilling, seedtime and harvest, symbolic of Chris’s development and change. Her development is related to the process of working the land.