How Can Make-Believe People Enrich Our Lives?
I learned how to stand up for myself from Scarlet O’Hara. Atticus Finch taught me about justice. Ahab reminded me just how unhealthy an obsession can be. A Cro-Magnon girl named Ayla helped me understand what it meant to be different from everyone I knew. When Jody had to shoot his pet fawn Flag, he prepared me for the moment when my beloved dog had to be put down. I crossed the prairie with Laura Ingalls and climbed the Alps with Heidi. Hid in an attic with Anne Frank. Black Beauty revealed the dignity of animals, and I never squashed a spider after meeting Charlotte.
As an adult, I suffered when Sophie made her choice. I learned about the world according to Garp and Forrest Gump. Jamie and Claire demonstrated true love in multiple volumes. I learned what it was like to live in a migrant camp with the Joad family and in a lonely mansion with Jay Gatsby. I cried when Woodrow and Gus hung their friend in Lonesome Dove, and cheered for spunky Ruby in Cold Mountain.
Can fictional characters enrich our lives? I certainly feel richer for having met Christopher John Francis Boone, the autistic young narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Sensitive Lily Owens, sassy Ellen Foster. Child narrators like Scout Finch, Will Tweedy, Meely LaBauve and Reuben Land remind me what it is like to be young and searching for meaning in life.
I hope to never meet a real life Hannibal Lector, but my encounter with him on the page reminds me that evil exists. LeStat helped me understand vampires. Don Corleone shed a whole new light on gangsters.
Fictional characters brighten our lives and break our hearts. They try our patience, engender our wrath and lay bare our emotions. A powerful character in a novel can seem more real to us than the neighbor next door. Many times, we know story people better than we know members of our own families.
Why? Because characters invite us into their lives and into their minds. They don’t hold back. They reveal their motivations much better than real people do. Fictional behavior must make sense in the big scheme of the story universe. In the real world, we are often left shaking our heads in bewilderment.
And if all that isn’t enough, fictional characters make excellent companions. You don’t have to feed them, and they pick up their own socks.