The Final Wall (Part 3)
The easiest way to manage such a thing would be to combine them with something metaphysical, while it's arguable whether or not metaphysical things are real, there is enough doubt about it either way to satisfy my personal conviction that they are real, and thereby satisfy the conditions for my own challenge. For example... I could write a character who is the very personification of Mercy, who in the story they exist in they are there within every person who chooses to be merciful, existing as that act itself, called into being by the choice to act upon feelings of compassion, empathy, and pity. And thus, if they are the very act of Mercy itself, that could extend beyond the boundaries of the story. Regardless of whether they are physically real or not, Mercy is something that exists in our reality, outside the realms of Fiction and Meta-Fiction. Even if the character cannot take the same form beyond the story I've written, I have chosen to make them not just representative of Mercy within the narrative, but the act of Mercy itself. So in some form or another they have agency outside of the story, outside the control of creator and audience. I told you it was a trick. A clever workaround. You could still argue that it's not really the character themselves, that Mercy was already outside the boundaries of the story and therefore using it to give the character agency is cheating and doesn't count. You could argue that the agency still lies in the hands of the people who are making the choice to be merciful, and not in the hands of some abstract metaphysical concept of Mercy. You could argue all of that. If I were to choose a different, perhaps better, metaphysical concept... I'm sure there would be a way to argue against that as well. The fact of the matter is, I don't know how to really give a character real and true agency, to give them and only them the absolute and unquestionable ability to give them their own freedom of choice. Because to do such a thing would require me to be able to grant life to a character, to pull them from the page, and to truly understand myself what it means to be real and to have genuine agency. I cannot do any of those things, not really. But this trick, this writing workaround? It's a spark of what I'm trying to achieve, a glimmer of something I hoped for. And that is already a step closer than I ever thought I would be able to go. What is the point of all of this? I'm not really sure of that either. It's just my own pondering as I make my own writer's journey. But maybe it can offer some insight to you on the nature of fiction and characters and reality, maybe it can give you something you didn't have before. Influence you in a way that neither you nor I can control or even understand. And that, perhaps, is another step closer.
