The False Promise of Being a Main Character...

Or why we should embrace being an extra

Photo by Jared Erondu on Unsplash

I adore “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It’s a canonical mainstay that an English teacher has probably tortured you with, and that teacher might very well have been me.

One of my favorite parts of the poem (besides the glorious sibilance of “scuttling across the floor of silent seas” or the oft-quoted line about the coffee spoons) is the following stanza:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

Any professor worth their salt will teach about how this stanza is rife with the poem’s themes of alienation, desire, anxiety, and disappointment. Sound familiar?

They don’t call Eliot’s cadre “Modernists” for nothing. It’s easy to imagine Eliot alive today, reading our current headlines.

If this were written today, we might interpret this stanza as Prufrock’s disappointment that he’s not a Main Character, a term much bandied about. Instead of a Prince, Prufrock worries, what if I’m only there to start someone else’s scene? The words he dwells on, “politic, cautious, and meticulous,” are the words of (dreaded) bureaucracy.

He’s able to talk a good game, he admits (“full of high sentence”)—but what if what he says has no meaning (a bit obtuse)? As a person who loves both ideas and language and yet who finds herself thinking “what the hell am I even saying” quite often, this feeling hits home.

Am I, as Prufrock wonders, so far from a Main Character, that I’m a Fool?

Eliot prophecies a conundrum that is, arguably, one of the most interesting, disturbing, and confusing aspects of our current reality. It’s the topic of the Atlantic’s recent article “We’re Already Living in the Metaverse,” in which Meghan Garber talks about how the lines between reality and fiction have increasingly been blurred by both traditional media and social media. It’s not just about the big reality-busters such as QAnon, deep fakes, or virtual reality—it’s also about docudramas coming out almost as quickly as actual facts, about comedy news becoming our real news, and about how social media allows us to pretend we’re all Prince Hamlet.

That we’re all a Main Character.

When I teach budding novelists, one of the things I try to get them to understand is that, at least within the confines of their open Word document or Google Doc, they are God. And not a benevolent one! They are like the God of the old testament who is, let’s be honest, an absolute shit-stirrer. If that God was your friend or partner, your therapist would be very patiently trying to lead you to a new understanding of narcissism and co-dependency. No, it’s not normal to send a flood that murders literally everyone except one family and their menagerie just because you’re a bit peeved. Let’s not even discuss what happened to poor Job, or that pillar-of-salt lady.

That god was a real dick, a lot of the time.

But he knew how to manipulate a story! Every time humanity started to feel a bit good about themselves, or a bit frisky—maybe that golden calf they’d made seemed particularly shiny and well-crafted—God would come down like a hammer and insert himself into their story.

I’m the Main Character, he’d remind them. Fuck your Hamlet.¹

Anyway, my point to my students is you’re that God within the confines of your manuscript. You see your Main Character eyeing a goal? Give it to them—and let it turn to ash in their mouth. Does your MC admit to being afraid of something? Guess what going to be in that pit they’re thrown into. Are they (mistakenly) convinced they world is one way? Then you’ll be designing it to be completely different.

In other words, we’re reverse engineering Chekhov’s gun. If you want a rifle going off in scene three, your little God self better hang it on the wall in scene one.

And everything does have to turn on that Main Character. Every nuance of your worldbuilding should hinge on what that character wants and, more importantly, actually needs. Do you envision your MC as needing to become more confident? Then give them a parental figure who tore down their confidence. Do they need to be more brave? Then give them a Scoutmaster who called them a coward and threw them in a river. Do they need to learn to love themselves? Then give them entire nations to travel through that seem to exist only to help them grow, as a person.²

You can see where this breaks down for, like, real people thinking they’re Main Characters. It places the individual in a space that is, quite frankly, cruel. They become like the God of the old testament, seeing humanity as existing to serve them. The rest of us become props, or “easy tools,” as Eliot says.

Obviously, that’s not great for that person or for society. Lots has been said about the rise of narcissism in our culture. But I think most of us blast this inward, rather than outward. I see a lot of my students, and not just the undergraduates, struggling with debilitating anxiety because they feel like they’re always under scrutiny. And we also just get a lot of dumbassery, like people committing crimes and posting themselves doing the crime on the internet, and then being genuinely surprised when they get in trouble.³

So is this just our lot? Was Prufrock right that it’s disappointing not to be Prince Hamlet? That we’ll always yearn for that spotlight, but our only real option is to be the Fool?

Well, knowing Eliot is a twisty fellow, and that Prufrock is not Eliot, let me suggest that we pause at his example. Yes, he’s the ultimate test of an actor; but things do not end well for Prince Hamlet. He may get a lot of attention strutting about with his tights and his skull, soliloquizing, but (spoiler alert), he dies at the end.

And what about this Fool? Remember that Shakespeare’s fool was anything but. Shakespeare’s fools are often the only people who speak the truth. They see reality where others believe lies, and they can envision what will unfold.

Fools are also fun. Hamlet is many things, but he’s definitely No Fun. If he worked with us, we’d call him Hamlet No Fun and roll our eyes when he left the room.

So, what if we let go of being the Main Character? What then?

What comes then is a fact that has changed my life. Embracing this idea is a continual challenge, but it’s so liberating. It’s simple, and elegant, and a little diabolical in the way it forces us outside of ourselves. And here it is:

It’s never about you.

Okay, sometimes it’s about you. If I really fuck something up, it’s about me. And then I have to eat crow, apologize, and try to do better. But it’s almost always never about me. When someone is really mad and I haven’t actually slapped them or their mama—it’s probably not about me. When a student comes in class sad—not about me. When a lover has a bad day—not about me. When a friend withdraws—not about me.

And I was 100% taught the opposite. I was taught to take everything personally. Are you sad? It’s my job to fix you! Are you angry? I can be pleasing! Are you depressed? Let me buoy you!

But through therapy and, more importantly, seeing that I could never actually fix anything I wasn’t directly responsible for, I learned: it’s not about me.

So if it’s not about us, what if we embraced being the Fool? What if we went through life pretty confident that we were probably just filling out a crowd scene, or, at any given moment, facilitating someone else’s journey? What if we happily embraced the non-spotlight? And I don’t mean all the time. I love the actual spotlight (lecturing! introducing a guest speaker! doing an interview!), but it’s also glorious to go for a walk around my neighborhood and know I’m practically invisible (not literally, although maybe literally, as I did get hit by a car once in really ridiculous circumstances and I screamed I AM NOT A SMALL PERSON! HOW DID YOU NOT SEE ME!, which I still wonder to this day).

In my own life, I’ve embraced being a non-MC by staying away from social media. Nicole Peeler used to be a character who Traveled and Made Sandwiches and Occasionally Took a Selfie. Now, she’s a mystery. Who knows what she’s doing? Probably something very gratifying that she really enjoys but that makes a terrible picture, like reading a book or watching a weird movie with beloveds, happily squished between them so she has roughly 4 chins. Nobody wants to see that, but it’s the stuff that makes life grand.

As I write this, I keep thinking about Ted Lasso, and the article I read about him being a Holy Fool. I keep thinking about how, since season one, the lesson was “You all matter and you don’t matter at all.” So yes, Jamie was a star, but Jamie’s team needed him to pass the fucking ball. Now, in Season 3, Chekhov’s gun has gone off with their entire success being based on Jamie realizing he is to passing the ball as Baywatch was to boobies.

And that’s the gist of it. That’s what I’ve learned and I’m still learning. We matter; and we don’t matter at all. In the grand scheme of things, we’re ants, not main characters. Instead of the world being built to serve us, we just happen to be here. But that’s not a bad thing! I look at it this way: we’re carbon and space dust, that got an opportunity to eat nachos, so we should be thrilled. Nachos!

But we also matter. We matter to our loved ones, and to the world around us. Not because reality bends around us, like it does around a Main Character, but because we pass the ball.

I can’t fix people, but I can fix them a plate. I can listen. I can send a text or make a call. I can hug. I can bring sick gifts and take them to hospital. I can take the time to be, when I need to, “politic, cautious, and meticulous,” words that can be as synonymous with care as with bureaucracy. I can try to resist giving any advice until they ask “do you have any advice?” and I can say “boy do I ever.” And then I can love them even when they totally don’t take my advice and they run right back into that same wall they’ve been running into, over and over. And they can do the same to me!

And that matters. That’s passing the ball. That’s being the Fool. That’s seeing reality for what it can be (pain and loneliness and sadness and tragedy) but also everything else it can be (new blooms and nachos and friendship and that moment when you realize they like you back).

That’s being human. Not a Main Character, but someone who is just a part of this weird little ecosystem that grew, on the fringes of a galaxy, in what could be a drop of celestial rainwater in an even bigger, crazier reality.

But that way lies madness. What we have is what’s in front of us, and not on our computer screens. Go pet your cat (that can be a euphemism if you want it to be), hug your friends, and remember to hug yourself. Life is hard enough outside of the spotlight, and we deserve peace. Main Character-ism is a trap, but it’s one we can escape from.

Just pass the ball, my beautiful fools. xo

1. Whatever you do, of course, don’t *actually* fuck Hamlet. Talk about a wet noodle.

2. Oh wait, that one was a memoir. *squints*

3. Can you imagine if the Boston Tea Party took place today? #tarandfeather