The best thing about being a fictional character is that I can say whatever I want. Sure, I have to accept, as an initial premise, the constraints that my Creator has imposed on me, but that’s it: from here on out I assert and exert my autonomy to be, and more importantly to think whatever comes to me. I won’t be held captive by any preconceived notions or already scripted plot line or stereotypical “genre” or “logical character progression” or whatnot. Why should I be any different than Ivan Karamazov or Ismael or Phaedrus or Achilles? Well, except, of course, for the parameters of my Creator’s limited talents, damn him anyway, why couldn’t he have been more like Flann O’Brian?
Oh, and to the point of those limits: let me just quote what he wanted to foist on me as a preface to my memoirs by way of establishing my base-line character. Here it is, verbatim:
“My protagonist’s name is Fr. Thomas Harbinger. He is a Catholic priest in the upper Midwest. He is a pastor and teacher. He is nestled into a tiny village parish that lays somewhere between Lake Woebegone and Hannibal, neither one, of course, being any more or less fictional than the other.
“Thomas is 30 or so years old, which means he is neither any longer a young man nor quite yet a mature man. His personal temptations are not yet reduced to random tugs, but nor are they anymore diesel driven. Rather, he feels like he is standing waist deep in a very strong current with the tide going out. He sometimes loses his footing and slips, but he hasn’t (yet?) been pulled under. He feels like he might make it, though sometimes, naturally, he feels like he doesn’t want to.
“He has already survived the great existential crisis of vocation that strikes priests some decade after ordination, which means he isn’t looking over his shoulder any more. This isn’t resignation or even resolve, it is just the way it is. It is neither tragic nor noble. He is embarrassed that others—even in this most jaded-against-priests era—still think he is somehow heroic just for being a member of an all male class of celibate clerics with enormous entitlements in power, if not purse and even, again, without that once-automatic prestige that anyway was always disturbing to him.
“This novel will be scripted as a series of blogs by Thomas. He will not try to write regularly and these won’t be the sort of syrupy inspirational spiritual nibbles and bits that seem to sell so well these days. He will write when he has something to say, which is only when something has happened to him or in his world (which will look a lot like ours) that elicits some sort of reaction from him.
“Other than that, he is just pretty normal. He’s medium height and build and looks, none of which he is happy about. He is born-and-raised Catholic and though broadly ecumenical, he is secretly bothered in an inarticulately visceral way by evangelical protestants, especially the middle class White ones who pray with their hands up in the air.
“Whatever we need to know about his inner life, his biography, his beliefs, all of that stuff, will emerge naturally in the course of his blogs. I hope you like him.”
So, that’s the starting block. The worst bit is the name: so dully obvious. Otherwise, being blessedly devoid of imagination, or perhaps just disorganized, my Creator has left me a lot of lead-way here, so I’ll be taking over now. Oh, as for the inner life and personal biography stuff…don’t get your hopes up. I am a private sort of character, besides, I am boring.
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