Stranger than fiction : the existential tale

Harold Quick does not live an authentic life, and that’s the least to say it. He wakes up, counts the strokes when he brushes his teeth, runs to his bus station, goes to work and does what he is asked, then gently goes back to his place to get some sleep. He’s gently settled into this quiet lonely life, unconscious of the true value of life because unconscious of his own death and of the possibility of impossibility it represents, before he starts hearing a voice, coming out of the blue, describing his every moves.  

      Then only does he realize there’s more to life than he thought. If he freaks out a little when he starts hearing his voice, he totally looses it when he hears about his near imminent death he had no idea about. Indeed, much more than an external alien voice speaking, it seems it is his conscious awakening, reminding him he is a mortal, a knowledge he seemed to have buried deep down, just like most of us. It is this prophetic voice, that suddenly blunders out the inevitable Truth that Harold has to face in order to live his authentic life. 

Faced with the realization of his own end, he is then forced to movement. He has to create meaning for himself ! Is his life to be a comedy or a tragedy ? How is it to end and how is his self to be defined when finally made whole ? Certainly, it cannot be limited to mere numbers and brushstrokes… With the realization of his death comes the realization of life, of the numerous possibilities he has been given. Harold can suddenly utter the I CAN Merleau Ponty described. He can play with perspectives (one again, with tragedy and comedy and their numerous subtleties), with movements, and suddenly the world becomes excitable. It can be changed and reversed depending on the perspective. Harold can live or die depending on wether he is in a tragedy or a comedy. Life has meaning, and Harold can create and change just as he wishes. 

Somehow, it is only because he used to live a meaningless passive life, just as a being-in-itself actually, that the voice can take hold of him. The author, Karen Eiffel, can only take seize his life because he has somehow been reduced to a being-for-other. He unconsciously refuses to act, to speak up, to actualize his possibilities and Sartre would say he is therefore totally engulfed in bad faith. It is in reaction to the sudden attack made on his persona, this invading of his consciousness, or its awakening, that he turns into a being-for-itself. He reacts to this objectivization and decides to act (which perfectly illustrate the ambiguity of the act of relating the self to others, just as Simone de Beauvoir demonstrated when she defended existentialist philosophy as being one of action). Though the author’s eye, Harold has become a neg-entity, but he won’t accept it and tries to break free of this role indefinite self he is being assigned.  

Eventually though, he discovers he cannot escape the fate Karen has chosen for him. He then has to take in two Truths. One is that death is inevitable, certain and non-relational (Heidegger). The Other is that he cannot completely escape the influence others have on him and that negotiations are constant between being-for-itself and being-for-others. In order for him to live the most authentic life possible, to encounter his Dasein  he’s got not only to chalenge but also to accept Death. And the last lesson he has to learn — all of this could have been avoided though if he’d studied philosophy instead of mathematics — is that Death is indefinite. It is his very symbolic watch that saves him from bleeding to death after being hit by a bus. Time is finite, yet it is still to go on running for him at least for a while. 

If the book Karen had written was a real masterpiece when it ended with Harold’s Death, it is then only mediocre when Harold lives. Indeed, it is unfinished, for Death is the only way ek-istence can be completed and be made to form a whole. Harold’s death is his uttermost possibility, and that’s why the first ending was so beautiful, so perfect. Yet, Harold does not die at the end of the movie, not only for us, spectators, to get a typical Hollywoodian happy ending, but because he still has meaning to create. He now has to fully commit himself to the art of becoming, beauty lying, not only in literature but in all creativity, that is to say within the infinite possibilities of Life itself.