There is something quietly exciting and revolutionary in the way fictional characters slip into the crevices of our identities, like a form of conscious rehearsal in real-time. As a musician, designer and writer, I’m fascinated by how literature and music models who we might become, through our own intentional creative processes. A laboratory for self-development where the boundaries of our emotions, rationale and identity soften, where we are free to borrow, or reshape the lives of others as our own. This is a remarkably innate human condition that we all access on a regular basis. And an admirable, and enjoyable part of a creative’s disposition and artistic kit.
In Poetics, Aristotle describes the idea of catharsis as a kind of disciplined encounter with emotions. If we extend that idea, engaging with fiction becomes a kind of practice, where emotional and ethical rehearsals are similar to a musician running scales before a performance.
But this rehearsal is not unilateral. Meaning is not embedded in the text. it emerges through the reader’s participation. Characters are incomplete without our interpretation. Their decisions only become legible as we internalise them. In this sense, reading is an act of speculative inhabitation.
Psychology reinforces this view. Dan McAdams suggests that our individual identity is narratively constructed through evolving stories, to make sense of our lives. Hazel Markus extends this with her theory of “possible selves”: the idea that we are drawn toward imagined versions of who we might become, or fear becoming. Fiction supplies these test-beds in abundance.
the luminous Jay Gatsby offers ambition without grounding. Doomed Don Quixote reveals the perilous edge where imagination overtakes reality. These are more than characters, they are templates encoding a way of navigating the uncertainty of being human.
And yet, this seemingly innocuous exercise is not without risk. Alex DeLarge, the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, stands as a chilling cautionary figure, mistaking his extreme and violent performative behaviour for identity, even destiny. His tragedy is the collapse of boundaries: the erasure of the line between rehearsal and reality. Alex weaponises the aesthetics of his world, turning Beethoven’s symphonies into a script for dystopian brutality. His story exposes the dark side of treating self-identity as a pastiche of borrowed tropes, curdling inevitably into nihilism.
Yet, this tension between emulation and authorship is where fiction does its most important work.
In my own fiction writing, this dynamic emerges through Lucas Vireaux, a neuroscientist-composer navigating the porous boundary between memory and creation. Lucas is not simply a character I observe, but one I use to think with. To test the limits of my own identity as both inherited intention and creative invention. Through him, questions sharpen: how much of him is self-discovery, and how much is composed projection?
Its worthwhile noting that this line of questions extend beyond literature into all creative practices. When I compose music: working through synthesisers, tape loops, and layered textures, I am engaged in a process analogous to narrative construction. Fragments are repeated, distorted, reframed. Meaning emerges from sequential arrangement and layering in this case, drawing on emotional tensions and release. The self, too, begins to resemble this process: iterative, recursive, and fundamentally open.
Here, Gilles Deleuze offers a useful image. The self is not a fixed structure but a rhizome (a network of connections without a singular root). Fiction does not impose identity upon this network; it activates pathways within it, allowing new configurations to emerge.
To read, then, is not simply to encounter a story. It is closer to participating in a controlled destabilisation of ourselves.
And perhaps this is where fiction reveals its deepest function, less as an escape, and more as a method. A way of engaging with the unfinished nature of who we are. A way to connect, and reconnect with ourselves through others, to remain in active recomposition.
References
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122.
Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41(9), 954–969.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
