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Recently speculative fiction author Charlie Jane Anders posted an essay on tor.com about character agency in fiction, interrogating the wisdom that characters, principally protagonists, are required to have agency. Anders presented Arthur Dent from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as an example case but confessed difficulty in presenting more examples but remained certain that they existed.
This got me thinking on such examples and what agency means for a fictional character. First off when we speak of a character’s agency, I think primarily we are pondering ‘plot authorship.’ The influence the character can exert to shape, direct, or stop the story’s plot. Certainly, Arthur Dent has very little plot authorship, he bounces, nearly always without his intention or proactive action, from crisis to crisis. Dent is far from the first or even most famous character trapped by their circumstance.
Alice from Alice in Wonderland is another such character. While she initiated the plot by following the rabbit from there on, she is on a ride that is mostly beyond her control. Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is also a character swept by circumstance with limited plot authority. For a more recent example you could consider Sarah Conner from the film The Terminator. Sara in that film is simultaneously the protagonist, the point of view character, and the plot’s Macguffin. Until the final sequences of the story, she is pulled along by other characters, her life in their hands with very little input as to what happens to her.
Clearly, a protagonist does not require a great deal of plot authorship for a story to be meaningful, memorable, or lasting. That said it would appear, at least to me, that the absence of plot authorship is an element in certain types of characters or stories.
Arthur Dent is the ‘straight man’ in Hitchhiker’s farcical, fantastic comedy. He has no agency because he is there to heighten the absurdity to deliver the comedy. Give him too much ability to shape the events and the farce would turn into mediocre adventure.
Alice and Gulliver as reader surrogates, for one as a person to give voice to the reader’s questions as the wonder of the setting spills out and the other to be the subject of the satire and to perhaps see their own reality and its insanity from a new perspective.
Sarah Conner lacks plot authorship because the story, not the plot mind you, is about her gaining it. By the film’s finale she has gained the ability to shape and direct not only her life but the future as well, but to gain it she, and we the audience, must first be made aware of it absence.
Charlie Jane Anders is correct you can obsess too much over if this character or that character have agency, but the lack of agency is also a specific trait that, like everything else in the tale, much serve a purpose delivering the author’s desired effect.
