Stranger Than Fiction

The title of this movie intrigues me especially. It implies that fiction, the telling of lives of fabricated characters, is indeed a very strange custom. I definitely agree with this. As if our lives aren't strange enough, let's create characters, somewhat molded after ourselves, and puppet them through a series of everyday motions, focusing on their little quirks and oddities. I will allow that not every work of fiction does exactly this, but for the most part, fictional characters are just as common (or uncommon) as you and I, especially when they're alone, practicing their own routines, in their own little worlds. Now, when you take a character such as Harold Crick, and show him in his own little step-counting, brush-stroke-innumerating, (I can't repeat a verb, thanks to my high school English teacher) world, and then jerk him out of it, creating an entirely new conciousness for him, that is when the strangeness of fiction is exceeded. By creating a fictional movie about a non-fiction, fictional character, the author of this movie, the true puppetteer, lends a new meaning to life as ficiton and language. Maybe we're all walking around, assuming our identities are truly ours, when really the language of others is driving our existence. Maybe someday a character will enter our lives solely to end that very existence we strive so hard to maintain. Or, if our narrator is kind, we will live to a comforatable old age, self-assured in our wisdom and disdainful of rabble such as that I am dictating at this very moment.

As Beckett would say "Conspicuousness is the ABC of my profession." As a narrator, Beckett is completely conspicuous in his ABCs of storytelling. Jane, the narrator of Harold Crick's life, becomes conspicuous when her voice is suddenly made manifest to her character. Her intent towards a fictional novel, one where she kills her character in a climactic fashion, bringing the book to a perfect end, is suddenly changed from simple language to a concious choice. This choice is whether she should take a human life for the sake of a perfect novel, or whether she should spare this life, risking her idea of an ideal ending. Harold's life is controlled by the language his author chooses to use. His entire existence is a fabrication wrought from the twisted workings of anothers mind. Yet, he conciously chooses to adhere to this fiction and language when he hurls himself in front of the bus, in order to facilitate the perfect ending. Not only is his life leading up to the point of Jane's voice becoming manifest controlled by language, he lets his life after be controlled by the very language meant to kill him.

Also, as a quick note, Malone hears his own narrator throughout the novel Molloy. "And the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard. For it is within me and exhorts me to continue to the end the faithful servant I have always been, of a cause that is not mine, and patiently fill in all its bitterness my calamitous part, as it was my will, when I had a will, that others should...Yes, it is rather an ambiguous voice and not always easy to follow, in its reasonings and decrees...And I feel I shall follow it from this day forth, no matter what it commands." (Molloy 126) This connection between Samuel Beckett's three novels and Stranger Than Fiction coincides with the idea of life as fiction and language. Both characters being controlled by voices vociferating commands, they share a likeness in situation as well as conciousness. They have their own conciousness, deciding to listen to the voice, but they also portray the conciousness of their author.