un--conscience

The episode of “Supernatural” we saw in class helped clarify several things we will encounter in class. I have been quiet in class for several of these reasons. The biggest thing that was a shock to me was now realizing that the characters we create could have a conscience. I have never looked at writing that way. I always saw characters as just that-- never as a being that could in fact think for his or herself.

Although the “Supernatural” episode showed Sam and Dean as each having a separate conscience, and they do, but they are not the writer’s creation. I don’t think a character that has been created can have a completely separate conscience from his or her creator. After all, it is the writer who is creating the character regardless if he or she is good or bad. In class when we went through truths and lies, our lies were somehow related to the truth, so we weren’t completely lying. I believe that the conscience that a writer develops in his characters is related to him in some way.

However, a character can be an extension of the writer’s conscience. The character can be what we deny that we, as writers, can be. As I read Cat’s Cradle, I realized that the story was being told by the character in the book, not directly by Kurt Vonnegut. This is the second time I am reading Cat’s Cradle and I never realized this viewpoint. If it hadn’t been for this class I wouldn’t have picked that up otherwise, but I still believe that Jonah, the main character of Cat’s Cradle, is a part of, if not a sub-conscious of, Kurt Vonnegut.

The best proof I can give of this is Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut was a prisoner of war and was detained in a place that the Germans and the prisoners called slaughterhouse five. Slaughterhouse-Five was not an autobiography but rather a strange tale, from my point of view, of a misfit individual in a world where he did not belong. Vonnegut lived through the events in Dresden but also had his character relive them with his ability to lapse forward and backward in time.

The point I am trying to make is that although we may create a character that could be our foil, we as writers are dictating their actions as if we were that person on paper. However, from what we have read and watched so far in class has made me start looking at literature differently, realizing the point that a character could be seen as having a separate conscience.