Over the past few months, I’ve been helping plan an old friend’s bachelor party, the experience of which has made me starkly aware of just how conservative I’ve become in middle age. Not politically, you understand—personally. When I was a kid, I was like Leo Getz in Lethal Weapon (I was seriously that annoying) who nonetheless fancied himself Martin Riggs; somewhere along the way, though, I grew up to be Roger Murtaugh.
And that got me thinking about how, at different stages of life, we’re sometimes lucky enough to closely identify with a particular fictional character in an exceptional way; I would say the experience is even as random and as rarified as true friendship: How many times, really, have we “met” a character who speaks so directly to us, whose emotional circumstances so closely reflect our own, that through them we vicariously attain some measure of insight… and maybe even catharsis?
We’re not necessarily talking favorite characters here; those come in spades. God knows, I love Indiana Jones and Jean-Luc Picard and Philip Marlowe and Chili Palmer, but I don’t necessarily—much as I want to—relate to those characters so much as admire their characteristics. In that way, they’re more aspirational than they are analogous.
I’d like to know which characters from fiction speak to you—and for you. I’ll get us started, selecting examples from three distinct phases of my life: childhood, adolescence, and midlife. (For those interested, I’ve included each narrative’s Save the Cat! genre.)
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