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Popular Culture Review
him access to places and people that are closed to the alpha male—A Beta Male
very-well may have a throwing knife concealed in the frame of his briefcase, but
it’s a good bet that he only uses it to open letters and clean his fingernails.” And
this is what makes him such a good character. His outcome is never certain and,
because of this, the reader is interested in what’s going to happen. Science
fiction novelist Elizabeth Bear tackles the subject in her monthly column on the
website Storytellers Unplugged:
A lot of writers tend to create very generic protagonists. 1
suspect this is a Hollywood influence, actually—these
protagonists often remind me of TV characters. Characters
who may be one step above stereotype—caricatures,
delineated in broad strokes. Often, they not only don’t have
much personality: they never really do anything morally
questionable or personally ambiguous (or if they do, the
narrative seems not to acknowledge it). If they ever do step
over a line, it’s portrayed and perceived as something gritty.
And the lines are very bright. (Bear)
She’s describing the typical Alpha Male character. The reader knows James
Bond is going to succeed. What he doesn’t know is if Woody Allen would
succeed in the same scenario. And if he does, how he does it is going to be 90
percent of the fun. Take the 1967 version of Casino Royale, for example. Here
you have Allen as Bond and he certainly doesn’t succeed, especially not in any
way the typical viewer would accept as heroic.
And this is what makes Christopher Moore so good at what he does. He
uses the Beta Male in his fiction so his readers never quite know what to expect.
One never knows whether or not a character is going to survive to the end of the
book. This is important for many reasons, not the least of which is it makes the
reader care about the character as if he were real. He wants to create a fictional
reality so the character can come alive, so to speak. That is to say, the reader
may be able to be quite obvious in the statement that the character is not real,
but as Seymour Chatman says, however, “this does not fully explain how we
imagine and think about them. After all, we may recall fictional characters
vividly, yet not a single word of the text in which they came alive” (Hughes 71).
With this in mind, we can look at the critical assessment of a character as a
“fictional truth,” which is not as odd as it sounds. “The only reason that the
phrase ‘fictional truth’ is not an oxymoron, as ‘fictitious truth’ would be, is that
fiction is a genre whereas lies are not. Being a genre, it rests on conventions, of
which the first and perhaps only one is that fiction specifically, but not always
explicitly, includes the intention to deceive. A novel always contains signs
whose function is to remind readers that the tale they are being told is
imaginary” (Riffaterre 1).
So basically, we have two conflicting ideas, that the character is both real
and imaginary at the same time. It’s a tightrope walk and Moore is very good at