The canon of high literature tends to feature arcs, but it's not necessarily a common trait. Picaresque stories, which are episodic and of the "here we go again" variety have been around for thousands of years. Think pulp heroes: Conan, Elric, the Three Musketeers. Things happen to them, there may be continuity between stories, the character may even change significantly over the corpus, but a coherent "arc" is non-existent or something accidental, that you have to squint to see.