or even in scenes, but sure, in Chapters too. Argh, my memory! I saw something on this in screenwriting, i'm pretty sure on Film Courage months ago, but I cannot recall the screenwriter teacher who spoke of it. Screenplays are shorter--maybe 35 or 40 scenes for a feature, half that for a TV pilot. Whoever it was (maybe Eric Edson?) said something that really echoed Dwight Swain, too, his concept of scene/sequel. A scene is goal, conflict, disasater. The disaster comes in the form of "yes, but" (the hero gets what she wants, but there's a catch) or "no, and furthermore" (the hero doesn't get what she wants and digs herself in deeper somehow, so she gets tested more). McKee in Story talks about a scene goes from positive to negative, or negative to positive, implying the same thing. Every scene has to have both plot and character dynamics. And beats that require 2-3 scenes, same. There must be a change, a kind of Freytag pyramid.
A character can't be the same, or in the same story place, when she enters the scene or chapter as when she leaves it, and the turning point into the next act (in 3 or 4 act structure) usually reverses the trend. So life is going okay until the end of the first act when the hero is propelled into the new world/danger. He keeps losing all through the second act until something happens--after the long dark night of the soul, he finds some gumption, or intelligently works out a new approach, and renewed, he wades back in and comes out victorious at the end.
But through that second act, every scene has to make it worse on the hero somehow. It cannot be the equal level of "this is hard and it sucks and I'm the same grumpy mood I was in two scenes ago." In The Fugitive it's bad enough being chased through by a train. Then you're in the woods in leg chains and prison clothes, in a strange place. But then Girard chases you with cars. WORSE. And chases you into a tunnel. WORSE. And a more narrow tunnel. WORSE. And catches you, and he has a gun and you don't. WORSE. At every point beyond the escape, our hero is more panicked, he's running harder, he's in a tighter (literally) spot, he's drawing on resources he didn't even know he had, digging down and becoming tougher. The jump (talk about tough!) resets everything back to a new chase, though now our hero grasps what a relentless adversary he has. And also that he can do things himself that he didn't know he had in him.
In Groundhog Day, the reversal is when he wakes up again on Feb 2. He tries solutions. His personality shifts from disbelief to anger to despair to hedonistic abandon to confusion to depression and finally to acquiescence. And he finally is shaken out of his core flaw. "The worst part is that you'll forget all this and treat me like a jerk again. It's all right. I am a jerk."
I think I'm rambling. Was any of that of use?
