Cast in words

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the secondrate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known it at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

- Lolita, Nabokov.

Literary characters are wonderful in that they are both full and inadequate at the same time. To us they are little more than what the writer has strove to show us. Transport them to reality, however, and we find them stupidly predictable, their script, their character configuration, all fixed in black and white and nothing else. Does it follow that if we wrote an encompassing script for them, an epic, life-sized script, they would mortalize into humans, our peers, our friends? Is there anything that differentiates us from typewritten characters whom we can predict the actions of in every instance, provided you've read the script of course. Is there a master script? Or do we write our own scripts?

We must not let God or Fate ordain our lives. They dont write our lives, we write it for ourselves. We are all unethical in this respect, which is the only way to appreciate the instability of life and of life itself.