By Ayşe Papatya Bucak •

I imagine many of us have heard the common textbook wisdom that story is dictated by a character’s desire, plot is generated by what characters do in the face of their desire, and endings occur when characters either do or don’t get that desire.

But this type of story, which admittedly can be great, seems dependent on characters who have the freedom to act on their desires, and it disregards how often both structural systems and chance limit an individual’s choices. Which is fine if you are writing about exceptional characters—heroic characters—but what if you’re not? 

I’d argue that few people have quite as much free will as creative writing textbooks suggest. And if this is true, why are we writing so often about the exception rather than the norm?

I suspect we like characters to have free will because when their actions are committed freely, we can judge those actions in moral terms. We can hold characters responsible for their behavior because they are responsible for their behavior. Most of us like to believe that individuals have enough power to change their own circumstances. Often, we want to believe that we are in control of our destiny, and so we want fiction to represent that belief. Or perhaps we know we don’t have control of our destiny, and so we want fiction to represent our fantasy of a different life. I get it. 

But some of our most complex literature is created when a character has to choose between a very limited set of options.

That doesn’t mean they fail to exert personal responsibility or that we can’t think about the morality of their actions it just means that literature asks the reader for a more nuanced response. 

Take Sethe in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Sethe escapes the plantation at which she was enslaved, but she cannot entirely escape slavery. When slave catchers appear at her home in Ohio, she feels she has only two choices: to allow her children to be taken back into slavery or to kill them. 

The moral wrong of slavery is obvious. But the novel asks: Did Sethe have the right to kill her own baby? Did she even have the right to choose? Morrison said in interviews that her position is that none of us get to judge Sethe’s action—only the baby who was killed does. But that doesn’t mean we don’t spend the whole novel going back and forth on how we feel about what Sethe did, and that fact deepens the whole novel.

In this case, Morrison didn’t only limit Sethe’s choices—she gave her two contradictory desires. Sethe wants her children to be free, and she wants her children to be alive. But in this scenario, she can’t have both. She has to choose one desire over another. The limitation of Sethe’s free will, not the elimination but the limitation of her free will, in that moment when she attacks her own children, is what sets up the rest of the novel. 

Sometimes a character’s free will is limited for only a portion of time. For example, Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “A Temporary Matter” takes place over five days, during which the married couple at the center of the story, Shoba and Shukumar, loses the power in their home nightly from 8 to 9 p.m. The electric company has warned them that this will happen, so they know from the start that it is “a temporary matter.” But the couple at the center of the story had a stillbirth six months prior to the events of the story and they are in the aftermath of this heartbreak.

They have been increasingly distant since the stillbirth, but the nightly hour in the dark each evening brings them into an intimacy that seems healing. They talk to each other more openly than they have in months, and they are physically more intimate. But on the last night of the story, when the power has returned, Shoba announces that she has found an apartment and she is moving out. Shukumar is shocked, and most likely the reader is too. 

But the surprise reveal—which can be hard for a writer to pull off in a way that doesn’t depend on an unnatural withholding of information—works for two reasons, one because the story is told in third person limited, from Shukumar’s perspective. Our cluelessness is because of his cluelessness. I’d also argue that the story, by first telling the story of losing the baby, has primed us for the fact that unexpected events, events that are out of our control, happen. A lesson Shukumar thought he had learned, but then had to learn all over again. Lahiri allows Shukumar to believe he has free will, that he has some element of control over what is happening, and then suddenly reveals to him that he doesn’t. 

I’d even argue that Lahiri presents the nightly loss of electricity as a metaphor for the much bigger tragedy of losing their child. Rather than write a story that looks directly at how powerless the characters feel in the face of that enormous loss, Lahiri puts that event in the backstory, and foregrounds this nightly, temporary loss of power. This story achieves more intensity in its micro-drama of the loss of electricity—literally a loss of power—than some stories do trying to convey the macro-drama of an enormous tragedy. She conveys the enormous tragedy through the micro-drama.

Within the story, Shoba is established as a planner. Lahiri describes her as “the type to prepare for surprises, good and bad. If she found a skirt or a purse she liked she bought two. She kept the bonuses from her job in a separate bank account in her name.” And the story pretty clearly implies that all of this planning was for naught when tragedy hit. When Shoba leaves her husband, it seems not so much that she is ending a bad marriage as she is taking control of one thing that she can. But we have been taught by the story that despite all of Shoba’s planning, she can’t actually prevent bad things from happening. Nothing about that fact has changed at the end of the story.

As writers, we might ask ourselves: What actions do our characters undertake to try to establish control in situations where they don’t have control? These can be life-changing actions, like moving out, or they can be ritualistic actions, perhaps smaller and more frequent.

In “A Temporary Matter,” one of the most surprising elements of the story for me is how it acknowledges the possibility of this couple having “tempted fate.” A plotline that is perhaps more common to non-Western storylines.

We are told that the last time Shukumar saw Shoba pregnant, he imagined a future in which he would buy a station wagon “to cart their children back and forth from music lessons and dentist appointments.” We’re told “he imagined himself gripping the wheel, as Shoba turned around to hand the children juice boxes. Once, these images of parenthood had troubled Shukumar, adding to his anxiety that he was still a student at thirty-five. But that early autumn morning, the trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he welcomed the image for the first time.”

But in the next paragraph, he learns that the baby has died. The story does not explicitly say he made a mistake in imagining the future, nor does it explicitly say that Shoba made a mistake in preparing so much for the baby’s arrival. But this juxtaposition of events surely plays into the common superstition that they have tempted fate. I don’t believe Lahiri is blaming these characters—that would be cruel —but she is reminding us of cultural or religious beliefs that caution against anticipating the future in this way. 

In some stories, the question becomes: What might a character do when they come up against an immovable force, whether they call it fate or something else?

In her story “Outside the Raft,” Dantiel W. Moniz handles the problem of a character who lacks free will in a similar manner to Lahiri, in that she gives that character a foil who is more proactive or at least tries to be. The narrator, Shayla, has a cousin, Tweet, who has parents in jail for murder. Tweet is pretty clearly the victim of low expectations. Shayla, on the other hand, is closely parented, watched over, and believed in. She is taught to value her own life in a way that Tweet is not.

In the story’s climactic event, the two girls and two other children are playing on a raft in the Atlantic Ocean when they jump off, not realizing “the ocean’s stealthy fingers had tugged [them] into deeper water.” The raft slips out of reach and Shayla says, “fear seized us; we became too heavy with panic to relax and float until someone noticed we were gone.” Shayla is tumbled under water by a wave, and it comes to her “that I was nine and beautiful and mortal.” Two of the children start swimming for the raft, but Shayla climbs on top of Tweet, who is struggling but not “strong enough” to throw Shayla off. 

In the end, Shayla is not actually saved by Tweet or by her own actions; she is saved by the kids who bring the raft back to them. But when the story flashes forward, we realize Tweet has fallen into the difficult fate predicted in her childhood, and Shayla carries the regret that perhaps “things could have been different for my cousin if I’d come clean about my own darkness.” But Shayla says, “I didn’t know how to apologize for wanting to save my own life.” Instead, after they reach the safety of the beach, she wraps her arms around Tweet and “like a mother might, pressed my lips into her neck…. ‘I love you,’ I said, and I willed the words to vibrate at a higher frequency, to jounce through her solid-seeming skin and settle in her bloodstream, as with the voice of God.”

So, we have two characters—one who seems to accept her ill fortune and one who fights for her life. The reader recognizes the tragedy of Tweet and the heroic qualities of Shayla. But those heroic qualities—her desire to save her own life—have a side of darkness: she learned that she was willing to sacrifice her beloved cousin’s life in order to save her own.

But the underlying irony of the story is that perhaps Shayla has no more control over her life than Tweet did. Shayla was not saved by her own actions—she was rescued by her half-brother and sister, who retrieved the raft and saved both her and her cousin. And her own successes in adulthood, while a contrast to Tweet’s difficulties, can be argued to come from all the advantages that she was granted as a child and which Tweet was denied. The story does not say with certainty that wanting to save her own life actually saved it. It shows us instead that such desire can come at a cost.

We might think of the hand of fate as operating in two possible ways in our stories. One is in the manner of the meddling Greek gods—who in their petty and selfish ways participate in the action of a scene, changing events as they happen. The second is in the manner of the omniscient god of One Thousand One Nights or of many West Asian tales—this is a god who does not change the course of events but knows them, because that which is going to happen has already happened. In both cases, our characters must handle what is thrown at them—they are not less compelling just because they aren’t in control.

 

---

AYŞE PAPATYA BUCAK is the author of the collection The Trojan War Museum which was awarded the Spotlight Award by the Story Prize. Her stories have been reprinted in the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies and she has received support from Yadoo, MacDowell, and other institutions. She lives in South Florida, where she teaches at Florida Atlantic University. Her novel The Anatolian Monster is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.

Featured image by Brendan Church, courtesy of Unsplash.