Curiouser and Curiouser

I remember once when a friend and I had just finished watching The Truman Show. We were utterly convinced that someone was also filming our lives and creating artificial moments. How probable was it, we thought, that the strangest things kept happening at the worst times. Later, during our sophomore year of college we would come to find out that probability was one in three but no matter. I no longer think a camera follows my every move, that a director feeds lines to the people around me, that I have no decision over my ending. But I do still think about concepts related to this matter.


The first such thought deals with existence in general. If you do not see something happen, did it really ever happen? Sure, I have a census that tells me there are X amount of people living in Thailand but if I never meet them does this render them unreal? What qualifies something to be labeled as existing? My second thought is over God. Suspend your beliefs on God for a moment and consider that there is in fact a God. Next, think about the idea of Stranger Than Fiction. God must create a death scene for every living person on this planet. God would have then created the tragic ending that is Socrates, Cleopatra, J.F.K, and so on. God is in that way an author writing out our stories and seeing them through until the end, but unlike the author in the movie he does not have us miraculously survive.


Truthfully, if one was to understand the concept of life as fiction there would be no consequences. When Will Farrel approaches the professor on what to do if in fact he is to die the professor advises him to eat pancakes. Clearly, he is trying to point out that Farrel can now do anything he wants to because he has been made aware of his death. Does this make life any less meaningful? An excerpt from a website dealing with this question: "If mechanistic theories are true, then there is no meaning or purpose to either the universe or anything in it. Though we can individually or collectively attribute meaning to something, or purpose to do something, these notions are functions of intelligence and emotion, and are merely phantoms. The fact that we can imagine something gives no substance to it. This is inescapable given the premises of a purely mechanical universe." The thing about humans is we are a group living in constant denial. We know inevitably that we will die yet we push this aside and try to accomplish something meaningful in our short lifespan.

The idea of someone else making all our decisions, makes it that much worse. If I have no control over my actions, why bother completing them at all? Whose to say the person writing my life will provide me with one I deem acceptable. To be sure, this did not happen in Stranger Than Fiction nor Beckett for that matter. Another site that deals with the question of life and fiction is An excerpt: "This paper argues that, in approaching this everyday process of life construction, it is legitimate and useful to apply critical frameworks which have originally been devised for works of fiction. Tile assumption is that the conventions used to make sense of one’s own life or another’s are similar to those employed by a literary author in the creation of a meaningful narrative involving the life of a fictional character. The justification for this transgression of disciplinary boundaries between science and art can be found in the dramaturgical model of social behaviour." All of human life is spent trying to create a structure of meaning and purpose, but what if all of that is just fiction? What if we as a human race have created the greatest fictional work of all time and are all none the wiser?