S. Harry Zade Reports on What It’s Like to Be Fictional
By: Keith R Wilson
Tags: Literature, Literary Criticism, Derealization, Fiction, Novel

S. Harry Zade Reports on What It’s Like to Be Fictional

Chapter 34

This may be a good time to interrupt this narrative to tell you what it’s like to be fictional. It’s not what you imagine.

You know the way cartoon characters seem to be immune to physical forces? They can run off a cliff, pause before they fall, get flattened when they hit the ground, inflate themselves up again, and walk on as if nothing happened. That’s how you might have thought it would be for a fictional character. Physical reality should be optional. I shouldn’t need to eat like anyone else unless it advances the plot or means something. Placed in a coffee house, I must drink a lot of coffee, scarf down pastries from time to time, and dine on nothing but panini; but that’s only to establish the setting. I should have no more need for sustenance than the plate on which the panini is served. Sleep should be unnecessary unless it’s to dream, as should brushing my teeth every day, taking a shower, and clipping my toenails, for you will generously assume I have good hygiene unless you’re told otherwise. I should be exempt from all the drudgeries of life. I should go from one interesting, meaningful, or dramatic moment to the next.

I’m unhappy to report that being fictional is not that way at all. I still need sleep. If I don’t eat, I get hungry. I missed the part about how the Weather-Beaten Man in a Cowboy Hat got from New Mexico to Connecticut because I had to take a leak. Having noted this, I went on showering and brushing my teeth, not wanting to risk having needed to. I’ll cut my toenails when they get long enough.

Maybe this isn’t necessary. Maybe most fictional characters can forgo the chores. We could blame the type of novel my Author has chosen to write. He could be so enamored with realism that not only will he not give me superpowers; I must also piss and shit like everyone else. You can thank me, Dear Reader, for not normally including those banalities in the narrative.

My Author made it so I must get in a car, or some such device, to go places, as well. In most novels, it seems that characters can fly in planes without bothering with security, drive without getting behind the wheel, and pass through walls without opening doors. It’s not like that for me at all. When the Lisping Barista and the Geeky Guy went to Massachusetts to see the Spellbinding Fish Fry, I was not far behind, trying to keep up, watching her car as she swerved from one lane to the other, knowing how the Geeky Guy must have felt, given his history. I was a zombie in the Happiness Parade, danced the zydeco at the edge of the pit, and was one of many in the bleachers watching the Lisping Barista straddle the Geeky Guy, thinking it should be me. On the other hand, I was not able to pass through the walls of the school bus and see exactly what was going on. Luckily, I didn’t need to.

While I do not seem to be blessed with omnipresence, omniscience is a different matter. Given observable facts, I am able, with the aid of my imagination to construct what goes on in the mind of the characters without having to crawl inside their heads. I knew what was happening in that school bus, even though I was not there to see it. You might say that’s not very different from you, if you are not a fictional character. It’s true that real people can infer intentionality with some degree of accuracy in the same way that, when you watch a man throw a ball, you have some idea of where it will go. Well, that’s the same for fictional characters; we have neither more nor less insight than the average exceptionally intelligent, extraordinarily intuitive person.

So, that’s what it’s like to be a fictional character; at least one created by this Author. I could have had a better author, I suppose; or he could have given me a better part. Being a narrator, passively observing events and impotently commenting on them, is not very different from being a professor of comparative literature. I would have liked to have been the leading man, courting the Lisping Barista myself. Things would go better if I took her to bed. Maybe I’ll have the opportunity. Perhaps after paying my dues as a narrator, my Author will see my value and give me a bigger part to play in this story. Let’s hope so. As long as I’m only the narrator, my talents are wasted.