Do Characters Have Agency?
An exploration of our relation to fiction and fiction's relation to reality by Elisabeth Dawson
Why do we talk about characters in a story as agents who could have made other decisions, while at other times we treat them entirely as characters of the author? For example:
Why did Anakin listen to Palpatine and turn to the Dark Side?Â
What message about the nature of evil is George Lucas conveying through Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side?
This is a topic I feel unequipped to address exhaustively, but one has to start somewhere. So, without further ado:
1. The simple answer is our ability to relate to characters makes them feel fully human to us. We recognize their struggle as our own struggle, thus we project our own agency onto them, even when we know intellectually that they were written by a creative mind, often trying to convey a message or explore a topic. (Kinda boring, right? Everybody knows this.)
2. The more interesting answer is that there are some really unique aspects to the process and nature of creative writing that both enhance and distort reality:
First of all, the creative process is wild. I'm pretty sure this is true across the arts, but I will speak from my experience as a storyteller in particular. Good stories draw from reality and extend it with imagination. But even so, your imagination is constrained to whatever degree of reality you have committed to. This is because stories are dependent on coherence and believability to hold weight with the audience. (Unless they are nonsensical or surreal for their own sake, but that's a different matter).
Characters, in particular, have to be relatable for readers/viewers to be invested in them, thus they must be 1) recognizable 2) feel fully human. When an author creates a character, they commit to certain history, traits, etc. This history and personality make it more likely they will make certain choices. I think this is often why a writer will talk about their characters as if they have their own agency. Once I commit to a character having a certain personality and psychology, he becomes "destined" to respond to certain events in certain ways. At this point, an author would often say they would have to go back and change major elements of the story rather than change that character's decision. It's actually very deterministic, which leads to interesting questions...Â
A. When a writer writes a story they are literally creating a whole world (world-building). This world is a replica of the real world but with intentional or unintentional changes. No matter what genre it is, fiction is always slightly removed from reality. Here we bring in Plato.Â
 "...a painter can paint a portrait of a shoemaker or any other craftsman without understanding any of their crafts; yet, if he is skilful enough, his portrait of a carpenter may, at a distance, deceive children or simple people into thinking it is a real carpenter." (Republic 598b)Â
Plato talks about how you can capture a likeness or an image without truly understanding the essence, nature, and function of the thing, and that is why art is always at least one degree removed from reality. (Plato thought it was several degrees removed) I think there is a deterministic nature to a lot of fiction and I think its source is the human limits of the writer.
A fictional world will always be limited to the writer's understanding. And a character will always be limited by the writer's personal experience, worldview, and beliefs about reality. In this way, when a writer crafts them in a certain way, the writer has constrained themselves into writing them a certain way (based on their own limited experiences and understanding of reality), but it can feel like the writer submitting to the will of the character (though really they are submitting to their own limits). Thus writers talk about characters having agency (because they feel like they have to submit to their choices; it is a false sort of agency), and I think that spills out to readers. The themes, plot points, and foreshadowing are also all elements created by the writer, which actually end up constraining him into playing out events a certain way. Maybe with our finite minds, all we are really ever able to create are deterministic worlds...
B. The second part of this is my personal opinion that fiction is just basically elaborate philosophical thought experiments (i.e. the Trolley Problem). Most story experts agree that conflict is essential to Story, and conflict always involves moral/ethical dilemmas. "Art for art's sake" may have some validity in other mediums (Plato and I would disagree), but fiction, by its very nature, is built on ideological content. It is conveying a message about the world, about people, about what has value.Â
Thus, to answer the question:Â
We recognize the content creator (George Lucas) as the author of the work and as the source of its ideological content.Â
We put ourselves in Anakin's place a) because we recognize his humanity and b) because we recognize there is something about the way George Lucas created him that constrained Lucas into a narrative path.Â
And finally, we recognize the thought-experiment element of stories and we engage in them through the characters, often putting ourselves in the place of the character, or simply using the character as a springboard.Â
But it would not be a moral dilemma if the character didn't have agency. Thus we, again, project agency to the character. Imagine the amount of power it would take to author a story with characters who truly had free will and to achieve the ending you wanted without overriding the free will of the characters. Something to chew on. ;)
Elisabeth Dawson is an award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy. Raised in the remote mountains of New Guinea, she has lived in California, Florida, the Bahamas, and Brasil. She currently lives in Idaho with her best friend and roommate, drinking lots of tea and learning crochet. She holds a B.A. in Biblical Studies and is currently pursuing a Master’s of Philosophy at Biola University.