“We read to know that we’re not alone.”1
Reading is relational. In a novel, the reader develops a relationship with the author, the characters, and even with themselves. In characters, readers can find someone like themselves or someone entirely different from themselves. Either way, they enter into a dialogue with the characters, they imagine the untold events of these characters lives (before, during, and after the events of the book) and they get to know the characters.
The reader shapes who the character is in the same way that a good character shapes who the reader is. Thus, a friendship blossoms. Text is not stagnant. Every reader finds something different in the pages of a book. The reader, inevitably impresses themselves and their own experiences onto a character, changing and shaping who they are, often in ways the author could have never anticipated. Likewise, the words of characters speak directly to the reader, sometimes encouraging them, sometimes challenging them, sometimes criticizing them, sometimes joking with them.
A reader, lonely or not, finds solace in the comfort of their literary friends. Maybe that’s not normal – maybe this is only the case for a few. But, if you think that it is not normal, I challenge you to approach your next novel differently. See if you can’t make friends with the characters – and it might not be the protagonist.
This is the precise reason why I am not disillusioned by the seemingly “unrealistic” happy ending. If I get to know a character, I also know that the close of the book is not the end. I’m not so naïve to believe that my friend, this character, will never face another conflict, but I’m glad to share in their joy and in the culmination of the struggles and the journey that I have accompanied them on. Because I know them, I know what happens next. Perhaps, not concretely (as in life), but I know what they’ve learned, what they’ve been through, who they have to accompany them onward, and that they are capable of facing the coming conflicts because they have made it through this one. (More to say on this some other time.)
The best characters are those that we carry with us long after closing the book. They’re the ones who we repeatedly come back to, the ones who have shaped who we are and what we want to be. They are the characters that we know so well that we know how they would act and behave in any situation and any time. If an author has found a way to give birth to such a character and to grant their characters this degree of freedom separate from their creator, they have been successful as far as I can tell.
1. I used to think this was a quote by the amazing C.S. Lewis. Apparently that is a wrong attribution, but regardless, it resonates.
