The Storyworld

 

If you think about it, a story is a dimensional cage where characters created by the author are trapped. Their ignorance that they are some systematic words put in between the lines is what holds the trap, dimensionally speaking, altogether.

As so, when the characters become finally aware of what their lives have been for the years is a moment of misery. The feelings, the actions, the desires, the intentions, and the flow of character are some word(y) nonsense marketing the reader’s attention. Who’s the reader? Who’s the author? At this point, this does not matter because if you think about it, life at this point is a dilemma of no choice. You are either forced to be a protagonist in a story you never really liked, an antagonist who is not necessarily living up to a villain’s career, or some side character left to complete the system or, in our case, the plot.

Imagine a world connecting at its core to this idea, a world of the millions of stories ever written all connected; a storyworld beyond our world’s limitations. But if that is true for all cases and every author is a master of their story, what happens to unfinished works?

Well, unfinished books are not left to an open ending for sure. They are more miserable. They don’t have an ending at all, even a built-in one. Take Edwin Drood, for example; Dickins’s last unfinished novel’s protagonist, whose writer died before completing his book. From Dickins’s first point of view, this is a story of an end that nobody knows but him. From Edwin’s second point of view, this is a life he woke up living without any choice whether to exist or not. From the reader’s third point of view, this is irrelevant; it’s not their life.

At least this won’t stay irrelevant to you, reader. After all, who told you that you are a reader? Within and within, beyond and beyond, the storyworld isn’t always fair, but does Edwin Drood seem to care?