Character, Narrative, and Authority

"Even if it is mere background, you should put your whole heart into writing it!" said the tattered man.
"But I don’t care about this part! It doesn’t even make all that much sense! It’s just essential to set up the proper part of the story!" said the other man.
"Oh, you’re just repeating yourself! Which, I might add, you do everywhere else!"
"I don’t even know why you’re here! That kid," the fingers-man pointed at me, "Is the narrator! You shouldn’t even exist!"
"Well, I do! Not for the lack of your attempts to eliminate me!"
"Oh, right, like I wanted to eliminate you. You’ve guided the rest of my stories, and my one other novel so far!"
"And you still won’t tell me how it all ends! Does the kid destroy or save the world?"
"I’m not telling. Because look at where this is. If I tell now, then they’ll all know."
"And why will they all know?"
"Because I’m writing this!"
"And why are you writing this?"
"To get around writing the fight scene!"
"Yeah, and this is so much better."
"Excuse me," I interrupted. "What’s going on here?"
"Oh, nothing to worry about," the typey-man waved his hand dismissively at me. "The narrative has fallen to pieces, so you’re stuck here while we work it out."
"And the narrative would never have fallen to pieces," the tattered-man started shouting, "If you had let me do it!"
"If I had let you do it, I couldn’t make it a sequence of memories that is usually three deep, and has twice been four deep!"
"Oh, whatever! Those four deep ones don’t count, because they were dialogue."
"No, they were monologue! Gave them each a full chapter."
"Yeah, you know what else you gave a full chapter? This."
"Well, this is nice. Very NaNo-y. And if anyone ever actually reads this, it will surely confuse them."
"And then no one else will buy and read it. People don’t like to be confused!"
"David Lynch’s fans do."
"David Lynch’s fans are a bunch of nuts who think that backwards talking midgets, lesbian sex in alternate dream universes, and uber premature babies are all cool."
"And you’re saying they’re not?"
"Well, of course they are. Well, not particularly the middle one. I mean, I’m a disembodied voice most of the time, how am I supposed to achieve sexual preference?"
"Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll end up as the name on the cover of a book jacket. But that’s not at issue. What’s the problem, if bizzare things are cool?"
"Well, mainly, they don’t sell books! Not enough people like this nonsense crap to make money."
"Ever heard of art for art’s sake?"
"And where are you going to make your livelihood if not from your books?"
"Oh, I have plenty of marketable skills. I could… I could write for soap operas!"
"Yeah, that’d hold your attention for maybe a month."
"Alright, I could become a quantum physicist!"
"Meddling with theories all day. Oh boy, what fun. Look, I just found this nonsense equation! It describes the wave of a football stadium in a way overly complicated way that could, in fact, apply to nothing else and doesn’t even properly describe this!"
"Hey, quantum physics is plenty usable! Look; I’m titling this section of my universe ‘Quantum Suicide’, after the derived theory from the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Schrodinger’s Cat problem."
"Oh, Jesus, here we go again."
"You see, you have this cat. And this box. And this particle that will decay at an unknown point in time. And this process that will be fatal to the cat that will be activated when the particle decays."
"You’re boring them…"
"You put all these things into the box…"
"Even the box?"
"No, but that could lead to some fun paradoxes later on."
"Oh, I see. Is that all?"
"No!"
"Damn."
"So, you put ‘em all in the box-except for the box-and close the box. Now you can’t see into the box. How do you know when the particle decays and the cat dies?"
"Hm… I dunno. How do you know?"
"That is the question. And that is the Schrodinger’s Cat problem."
"Why do you want to kill cats," I interrupted. "This life I’m living here involves lots of cats."
"Oh, they’re all Schrodinger’s. You can never tell when they’re dead. Just like all the dogs are Pavlov’s. It’s kind of funny. Schrodinger hated Pavlov. Just by association. Yet, they’re the two most important parts of reality: Mystery, and Repeated Responce."
"Hey, you’re getting off topic here. Save it for another time slip." The tattered man brought us back to what passed for reality in this non-reality.
"Oh, alright. Where was I?"
"You had just finished explaining Schrodinger’s Cat to us."
"Oh, right. By the way, Robert Anton Wilson is a genius."
"No he’s not, he’s a madman. I still think he’s Greg Hill."
"I still fail to see the insanity."
"Oh, come on! He jumps through reality! He changes time! He has theories about the Them!"
"And I don’t?"
"No, that’s exactly my point! You’re a madman too! You’re rambling!"
"I can tell. I am, after all, writing this. You know, come to think of it, I could just write out right out of existence."
"Ooooh, I’m so scared! The big bad author is going to eliminate the narrator."
"I will, believe me!"
"Hey, could we get on with it?" I yelled. "I’d like to remember exactly what happened after I beat Emirikol."
"How do you know you beat Emirikol?" The author (Fingers) gasped.
"Well, I’m still alive about a decade afterwards, so…"
"Oh, right."
"Which is another thing that bothers me," the Non-narrator (Tatters) started, "But we’ll get to that later. Back to Copenhagen."
"Ah, yes! Anyway, Copenhagen proposed that it was impossible to know whether the cat was alive or dead. So, he decided, by extension of that, that nothing can be in one state or another unless it is observed as such."
"And there goes Copenhagen."
"Now, what was the point of all that again?"
"Quantum Suicide, I believe?"
"Oh, right! Well, the Copenhagen Interpretation has since been extended to consider what would happen from the Cat’s perspective."
"Oooh, that’s a good question. What would happen?"
"Well, the cat would never be able to observe it’s own death. Its consciousness would survive on through collapses of the state vector where the particle does not decay."
"So, no one ever dies, in their own universe?"
"Exactly!"
"Oh, that’s a bunch of bullcrap."
"That’s an opinion."
"What else is narration?"
"Storytelling?"
"But without bias, stories are uninteresting. You have to form an opinion about what you’re talking about, or else your just conveying dry facts."
"Is there anything else?"
"There’s opinion."
"Isn’t that kind of circular?"
"Have you ever heard any other kind of argument?"
"Haven’t you?"
"Which one am I again?"
"Weren’t you Guildenstern?"
"Wasn’t it my turn to be Rosencrantz?"
"Hell, now you’ve gotten me confused."
"Statement! Point, me!"
"What?"
"Haven’t you ever played questions?"
"Oh, Christ, you’re not going to pull this crap on me again, are you?"
"Have I ever tried to pull any other kind of crap?"
"What are you talking about?"
"What is anyone ever talking about?"
"Rhetoric! Point, me!"
"Oh, go to Hell, will you?"
"Haven’t you ever been?"
"Which one am I?"
"Non-sequitor! Point, me! Game Point!"
"WHICH ONE AM I?"
"Oh, come now, you’re such a sore loser."
"Whatever happened to Copenhagen?"
"He killed himself."
"Did he stop existing?"
"We can never know."
"Unless we kill ourselves."
"Or each other."
"Or this kid."
"Don’t worry. That’s coming."
"What?" I asked panicked.
"Oh, nothing. Now, which one am I again?"
"Didn’t you just ask that?" By this point, I couldn’t tell the difference either.
"Dammit, now I don’t even know which of us is talking!"
"Or which of us was winning!"
"Or even what we were playing!"
"How about Boggle?"
"Ha! Gorrila! Right there!"
"We haven’t even started yet! And besides, that spells Quezacoatl."
"That’s not a word!"
"But 42 is," said the man with penguin limbs walking past.
"Oh, hell, the narrative is even worse than I thought!"
"And I still don’t know which of us was writing, which of us was narrating, and which of us was bitter."
"Perhaps we should all switch off?"
"No, that could become dangerous. Not good to have the author be the actual first person narrator."
"Why not?"
"When that happens, they start trying to write wonderful things for themselves. Life becomes too easy."
"This has been going on for ages now."
"Or is it pages?"
"Life is a novel after all."
"And whichever of us is the author is playing the trick on the rest."
"Or possibly even himself. It could be me, you know. I’m not sure."
"Neither am I. But one of us could be lying. Maybe the kid knows?"
I shrugged and shook my head. "I’m pretty sure one of you is the author. I don’t think it’s me."
"Well, you’re no help then."
"I don’t know why whichever of us created you created you."
"Hey! I’m having a life over there! And… and…" I hesitated. Maybe I was the novelist, and one of them was the character.
"You see? Now even you’re lost. We’ve all switched heads."
"Or have our heads switched us?"
"The walrus and the carpenter went walking."
"The carpenter is Jesus, you know."
"No he’s not."
"How can I trust you? You might be the novelist."
"Well, I know that the carpenter isn’t Jesus. He wrote it so that the illustrator could choose to draw a carpenter, a butterfly, or something else. They all fit with the rhyme scheme."
"Now that doesn’t make any sense! Butterfly and Carpenter don’t rhyme at all!"
"Hey, that’s a good point."
"Where’d you learn this?"
"From K.E.N."
"Oh, that thing doesn’t even keep its number constant, much less its mind."
"Oh, it knows what it wants."
"This sure does eat words."
"Aha! You’re the novelist!"
"I wasn’t a moment ago."
"But weren’t you before?"
"I don’t know. I’m afraid to check."
"So am I. What if I was the novelist? What if all this is my fault?"
"I don’t know. Didn’t one of us have another complaint about this whole thing?"
"Oh, right, we did, didn’t we?"
"What was it, I wonder?"
"Something about nonsensicality?"
"Oh, right… I think… Perhaps it was the fact that the hero is remembering himself as a child, yet he’s smart enough to have witty dialogue with the villain. But, despite that, he is so naïve as to just rush into a war against the villain, without finding out if he’s really a villain."
"Well, he did see the villain fry a random cat."
"But what if the cat were the real villain?"
"Character has a thing for cats. Really likes ‘em."
"Oh, come now. That is so… cheatery. You have to have more set up."
"Oh, fine, I’ll get to it later."
"You’re going to go back and write more?"
"Oh, hell, I’m the novelist, aren’t I?"
"I don’t remember. Was it me who were the novelist earlier?"
"Your tenses are getting mixed up."
"I thought it was my conjugation."
"You never know."
"You’re the one writing this, you oughta know."
"I thought you were writing?"
"Don’t you discriminate at all?"
"Discrimination is wrong. I think it’s getting close to fixing the narrative."
"What is it?"
"The fourth factor in writing. After Author, Narrator and Character."
"You mean Setting?"
"Oh, then the fifth. After Author, Narrator, Character, and Setting."
"What is it?"
"You really want me to tell you?"
"Yes, please do. I’m sure the kid wants to know too."
"Yeah, I really would." I figured out that I was Character. Setting must be where we were. Or maybe it was stuck back out there.
"Oh, I’m not sure I oughta tell you."
"Wait, I thought it was me that was telling?"
"Perhaps we should tell together?"
"Or perhaps the kid should tell us?"
"I don’t think he knows."
"I don’t think I know either."
"Well, I thought I didn’t know."
"But you said you did!"
"No, you did!"
"Which one are you?"
"We figured that out, but then I forgot."
"Kid, can you tell us which is which?"
"No, I’m sorry, I can’t," I said solemnly, noticing that they were now two of the same.
"Damn."
"Wasn’t one of you going to tell the other two of us what It was?"
"Oh, right. Wait, which one are you?"
"I’m Character!"
"That means that I’m either Novelist or Narrator."
"And I’m either Narrator or Novelist."
"But what if you’re Setting?"
"Narrator doesn’t do anything, anyway."
"Not in this one, at least."
"Narrator is all important in the others."
"But not this one. Except for the fact that Character has taken the role of Narrator. Which means…"
"Something about Copenhagen."
"Oh no, not this again."
"What is It, anyway?"
"It?"
"The fifth element. Whichever of us knows that must be Novelist."
"But what if neither of us knows?"
"Then It will never fix the narrative."
"And we could never get on with it."
"Oh! I know what it is! It’s…"