We are All Fictional Characters
How our lives gain meaning from the way we narrate them.
The vicissitudes of life are the soul of great works of fiction. Novels, movies, series: they all manage to make us lose contact with reality for a while precisely because they are made of the same substance of life itself. The leap from everyday life to fiction is not that big. After all, the story of a fictional character is nothing but the life someone else had or could have had, and ultimately that you could have had.
Life is narration, and narration is life. In effect, it could be said that we are fictional characters in the novel of our lives and ultimately in the great novel of human history. This way of understanding the self has roots that go back to stoic philosophy and has distinguished contemporary advocates like Daniel Dennett and Luciano Floridi.
The psychologist Donald Polkinghorne present storytelling as a fundamental cognitive process:
“Narrative is the cognitive process that gives meaning to temporal events by identifying them as part of a plot. … [I]ndividuals construct private and personal stories linking diverse events of their lives into unified and understandable wholes. These are stories about the self.”
And that’s central to personal identity. In this view, the question “who am I?” is basically a question about what kind of character in the story am I.
If that is true, then just as great works of fiction have the shape of our lives, we should expect a good and meaningful life to resemble fiction, at least in some way, and this means we can learn quite a lot from it. In this article, I would like to share with you three ways you may find helpful to conceive yourself in such a narrative way.
Good Main Characters are not all Kings and Queens
We are constantly, in all domains, bombarded with life-models telling us how we are supposed to aim to be. World-leading entrepreneurs and managers tell us what job we should desire; sexy and charming celebrities set the standard of how we must aim to look. Pick the domain you prefer, and you’ll see that there’s a standard model of success for it.
However, perhaps focusing too much on these models leads us out of track. What makes the main character of a novel a good main character? Must he or she be rich? Famous? Beautiful? Successful? Arguably not. You wouldn’t claim that the great Gazby is a better character than Oliver Twist because he has more money and success, would you? Just read around some articles on character creation, and you’ll hardly find the tip, “make them rich and successful.”
A good character is one whose life is worth being told. One who has a full life: full of thoughts, emotions, sentiments, connection, belonging. A life with depth. A good fictional character has these properties, and so does a meaningful life.
This, of course, is not to say that you shouldn’t aim at success. Still, if you are asked to sacrifice what would make you a good character to follow a plot forced on you by someone else, perhaps you should stop for a moment and consider carefully whether that’s worth doing. To me, meaning comes before success.
Find Meaning in Misfortune
You are not only the main character in the novel of your life: you are also the author. Use that! Of course, you don’t have on your life novel the same freedom J.K. Rowling had on Harry Potter. She could decide absolutely everything, including things like how tall characters are. You are not. The facts constrain your story. Still, there are many ways of describing the same facts.
In a TED talk, Emily Esfahani Smith takes the example of a guy who remained paralyzed playing football. After the accident, initially he told himself the story many of us can imagine: “I had a happy time being a football player, and now it’s all over.” Of course, his paralysis was an unchangeable fact. Nevertheless, the novel could have been narrated differently, and eventually, he came up with a new story: “I was very selfish before that accident, but now I have discovered my purpose in serving others.”
The accident had given him an occasion to reflect on who he was and what he really wanted in life. He discovered that dedicating his time and efforts to other people was much more valuable than selfishness for him. The latter is decisively a better story and a story that promises to go further. We want to keep reading that story.
Crucially, the second plot gives meaning to the story, endowing it with a bottom line. The same you can do with your life. An ended relation, the betrayal of a friend, the death of a relative, the loss of a job: you can do nothing about the past, but how you can narrate it changes your present and future. Use facts to come up with a meaningful story.
Don’t be the Only Character in the Novel
You may like the character of Harry a lot, but how good would the novel have been without Ron and Hermione? Probably not nearly as good. You don’t need many characters in the novel of your life, but you need some. And by ‘some,’ I mean some primary characters.
I can recall the sense of excitement and awe I had in reading the pages of the Lord of The Rings where the Fellowship of the Ring was constituted, or the sensation of belonging I felt in watching the classroom of Dead Poets Society. Being part of a close group is not only fun, comforting, and gratifying in itself; it also adds meaning to our lives. It makes us more intriguing characters.
To put the point in narrative terms, one should consider that each of us is not the only person narrating the story of his or her life. Others do as well, and part of your life’s meaning comes from what kind of character you are in other novels. Indeed, sometimes we can be so close with someone to end up having a single novel with more than one main character. Perhaps that’s what true love is: making two life stories one.
The Takeaway
For the sake of your forgetfulness:
- Meaning is independent of success. You need to be neither Elon Musk nor J.K. Rowling to be a good character in the novel.
- Meaning can be founded in misfortune. It’s not up to you to decide what the past facts are, but you can narrate them to make your future better.
- Meaning is connected to belonging. Part of your life’s meaning comes from what you are for the people who are close to you: don’t be a lonely protagonist.
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