Back in the day, there was a fictional character that I closely related to -Gnossos Papadapolous, the main character in Richard Farina’s book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. Paps was a staunch anti-establishment type like me, into pot, unable and unwilling to convert from the hip way of life he lived to the conformist norm. Like me, he was into road trips to wherever, and whenever. He was more than a bit self-destructive, but thought he was raging successfully against the machine. What’s not to love about the character?
However, Paps and I diverged eventually as I began to explore other ways of living my life, and especially being a lot less destructively confrontational with those whose lifestyles diverged from mine. First to go very early was the pot, then the road trips, and finally, as I matured, the self-destructive behavior. If I were to do a check-up of what I still had in common with Paps, it would be the anti-establishment attitude. It’s still going strong, but finds more constructive ways of expression.
Fictional characters are stuck in the moment in which they were written. We are not, and should expect to grow and develop. Something that they can not.
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