The Concept of My Character

William H. Gass says, “Characters in fiction are mostly empty canvas. I have known many who have passed through their stories without noses, or heads to hold them; others have lacked bodies altogether, exercised no natural functions, possessed some thoughts, a few emotions, but no psychologies, and apparently made love without the necessary organs.” How do I, as a breathing person, feel that a character in a book is somehow life-like, that I can take them seriously and form attachments? One way these attachments of mine manifest themselves is through emotional reactions; for example, anger at Vronsky’s fluctuating love. How I can react to characters in fiction in ways similar to my reactions to people? How can I justify looking to understand my character by reading? I suspect the answer lies in how I perceive real embodied people. How much can we really know of a person? How many aspects do we explore? We get sensual experiences with a person, so we see and smell them. We talk with them, and hear some things that they say.

I had a disturbing experience a month ago when a couple of friends lectured me. Based on what they said, I felt like they had a skewed vision of me in their heads. I called my best friend and told her what they had said and what I thought the implications of those statements were. I explained the history of our interactions and how I understood why they would think that of me based on that history, but their conclusion was wrong because they didn’t know everything. And I was frustrated, because I wanted them to not come to conclusions about me and then correct the things they thought were lacking, but try to understand me. That is why I started talking to them that day in the first place. My best friend confirmed that they did, indeed, think these things about me, and that they were, indeed, wrong. And then she said something that I had never thought of before but was very obvious. These friends of mine are not invested in understanding me. They love me in a real but casual way. It took my best friend and me years to recognize the nuances in the other’s most emotional and frenzied outbursts. These friends have not expended and most likely do not have the energy and time to understand me. And, as an added bonus, my best friend told me that I did not have to try to understand them. It was a call to categorize the people in my life.

Several months ago, I had a dream about a lover. He was excited about another woman. He said, “She was scrawny, and she was beautiful.” I asked him to look at me, and he said he wasn’t interested in my pretty. “You are on the pretty side of regular.” I woke up hot and wet and unhappy.

It was frustrating to be tossed because of appearance. I have my physical flaws, but I am aware that physical beauty is not one of my weak points. (I am vain.) The fact that this dream was about physical beauty is essential to the basic symbolism of the dream. What was occurring in my dream was that the person from whom I desired and expected intimacy and understanding was not seeing me. On an evident level. I was being perceived and valued based on a small and baffling set of my characteristics. And the betrayal I felt in the dream was a betrayal to my perception of this man. I felt emotionally invested in him, and was completely taken aback by this distant behavior. The situation was painful precisely because both he and I were feeling based on shallow perceptions. Not shallow values (which my lover presumably had as well—scrawny???), but shallow perceptions. I only thought we had intimacy, and it suddenly became clear that we did not.

I told my sister that the struggle of my life is loneliness. In one I form or another, it is what I beat against. Her solution was God, that God could heal loneliness. There is a very real point there. The notion of the Christian God is amazing. God is someone who knows me, who presumably loves me in a way that is perfect. A perfect love, and it is mine. I remember being a little girl, three or four, and attempting to imagine nothing. Nothing meant blackness, and there would be a void of blackness that surrounded the pulsing nectarine pit that I imagined my brain, the me that I could never imagine away. I would be frustrated, lying on the carpet, never being able to get rid of the image that I understood as me, thinking, pulsing with my breath, always there. Existence was me. As long as I exist, there cannot be nothing. But if there is God, then there is something besides me.

While I find the ideas behind my sister’s solution so intriguing and beautiful, I didn’t want an answer. I want her to feel with me. I want us to co-feel. I want my friends to co-feel. I want my lover to co-feel. I want to feel with them, only perhaps not as much as I want them to feel with me, to see all my pieces. While God offers a promise to transcend my lonely single existence, I want it to be transcended with people. So it’s not just my experience, so it's not just me and God in the black. I want, somehow, to get beyond the barrier between people that is only being able to perceive portions of each other and really connect. I find my desires in the situation are futile; the idea of a lover with whom I have incredible intimacy and understanding is so much more satisfying to my loneliness than being made whole by God.