Mixing Myself Up with the Characters - Am I Alone in This?

The first book about which I specifically remember crying was Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows. Gosh darn those stories about faithful dogs – they’ll get you every time. More recently, I had quite a good cry over Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and its protagonist’s beautiful recollection of a life that has passed him by. Who hasn’t lain awake thinking these thoughts? I might also mention Hardy’s excruciating Jude the Obscure, which hurts even more when you believe yourself to be living an unnaturally parallel life to that of the title character.

My first train of thought was that fiction teaches us proper social behavior by modeling it for us: this here is an appropriate time for sorrow, while in this situation we celebrate. We should respect loyalty; we should mourn loss; we should hope to achieve great things. I don’t mean that fiction does this in a vaguely threatening nefarious way – it simply does it. We pick these images up and store them unconsciously (one of literature’s few lessons that actually can be learned virtually by osmosis), and we recollect them or reenact them (again, often unconsciously) when analogous situations arise in our own lives. When we read about them again, we read into them our own actual experiences with the topic, and in doing so we tie in the loop of catharsis, along with reinforcement of social behavior. We learn to live by way of example, and whatever examples we lack in the direct contact of our lives, media is happy to supplement. We often live, then, by the example of the media we intake, and at the end of the day, we seek solace in this same media. I do not make the claim that we are slaves to the general media, as we have an unfathomable degree of choice in what we partake of, and whatever we do choose to read/watch/listen to, we can feel strongly for or against. What I do claim is that we form a bizarre relationship with the stories we choose to listen to, and that far from being simple, useless tales orbiting the periphery of our lives, they become a deep part of our personal identity.

We do this all the time – we pick up a character in a book or film and string along with them for awhile, identify with them, think of ourselves (flatteringly or not) as their avatar on this earth. And when we can convince ourselves thoroughly of our likeness to the characters, things get weird. As I read, I might perhaps notice that Jude the Obscure makes a decision very similar to one I just made, and I might note the next day that I have made a decision very similar to that which I just read about Jude making night before. And then – wait, did I make the next decision, or did Jude? Did I make the same choice that I would have made had I not read the book, or did my self-identification with the character of Jude cause me, even slightly, to choose a behavior more like his, or what I would imagine his to be? After all, I like Jude. But then, I don’t want my life to turn out like his, and so maybe I contradict him after all.

Fiction, or even gripping non-fiction, pulls us along its intricate canals. I wonder whether it would be misleading to say, in this case, that fiction teaches us. Perhaps it is more to my point that fiction lays before us different possible paths – there is nothing that says I ought to act in the manner of such-and-such a character, but there is a book that tells me what might happen if I did. Not “what might happen” in the way that a fable tells us “what might happen” if we are greedy, or kind to strangers, or foolish with our money, but who we might become. In this life, rain falls equally on the land of the just and the unjust. Given this – that things might go well for us whether we act for good or ill – our query tends away from “What is the good?” and toward “Who do I wish to be like?” And in response to this query, each of our stories has its own suggestion.

My best guess is that I’m wading around the territory of psychology when I say that after we choose a character with whom we self-identify, we begin to model behavior on said character. This is one reason we all love great hero stories – Braveheart and the like – and find ourselves deeply disturbed by the probing of our own darknesses in films like, oh, say, The Dark Knight. In the first case, we get to make the satisfying claim that we are acting courageously, like Braveheart, every time we make a somewhat bold decision, while in the second, we find ourselves looking into the consequences of our actions, at our own duality, at the vile closeness between us and the evil around us.

That’s an overly simple statement, and when I look at it again, I would add that it is overly Freudian, with all of its claims of identification and all that rot. Also, if I say that we model our behaviors after characters, it implies a specific intent to do so, when what I mean to say is that once we have identified with a character, the character itself shapes our behavior to a degree, because we have added this character into our definition of who we are and how we behave.

Does anyone else ever feel this way? I think of a few specific cases in my own experience. I’ve already alluded to the example of Jude the Obscure. I found myself, years after having read the book, still making decisions and thinking to myself, “Wait, am I doing this because I honestly think it’s the right choice given my own experience, or because I think this is what Jude should have done in his similar situation?” I still have only partial answers to that. Another text that haunted me for years was the poem “Wild Oats,” by Philip Larkin. Again, the question: “Am I the kind and tender person that my mind probably wants me to think I am, or am I more simply the speaker of this poem, too selfish, withdrawn, and easily bored to love?” In both cases, for the record, believing my supposed identity with the character/speaker threw me into stubborn depressions. In these depressions, I may have acted even more like the characters, though I was at the same time even more conscious of how little I wanted to be like them.

I don’t know where to take this meandering thought-trail. It has very specific feelings attached to it for me, but I seem to be having an unusual difficulty expressing them. I will try one last time to say this simple thing: sometimes I read or hear something that, for whatever reason, seems to announce itself to me like a curse. And like any good curse, it doesn’t matter whether I fight it or embrace it: it all plays out just as the oracle predicted, as tightly wound as Oedipus, Laius, and Jocasta.

I would love to hear any thoughts and impressions from anybody, or questions, or greetings from the black, churning void of the internet.

Does no one at all ever feel this way in the least?