don't hurt your brain

April 23, 2009 7:48 AM

Is it possible to write a story with no hint whatsoever of any other being but one?

I am wondering if it is possible to tell a story about one character, and one character only. What I mean is, can a story - that others would accept as a "story" - exist in which there is no reference to any other living being but the main character? And I mean no dead persons, no thoughts about other beings, no clues to the results of actions of any other life-forms, no imagined people, animals, supernatural beings, no impersonal roles (or groups of people) that somebody would have to fulfill eventually, no imagined life-forms in matter like machines and so on.

The closest I could imagine was
* a story about someone thinking about his or her past or future, but if you are strict you could classify this as another character
* a story about natural phenomena that does not connect them to any possible higher powers
* a story about phenomena that happen in or on someones body
* a story in a technical context which ignores all inherent connections to other people

Does the concept "story" imply that more than one character has to be in it? And are there any philosophers, culture, social or media theorists, linguists, authors, whoever who have thought and written about this?

posted by dnial to writing & language (22 comments total)

A Bunch of Rocks counts, I think.
posted by odinsdream at 7:51 AM on April 23

Sure, your story just requires conflict and it doesn't have to be against another person.
posted by Kirklander at 7:56 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]

Beckett did this.
posted by kickingtheground at 7:59 AM on April 23

odinsdream - Nice, thanks. But doesn't this one need the "you" in it? But yeah, a story of a god-like creature might come very close to this - but still, if this god was the only living being in the universe, it would be an extremely boring story..

Kirklander, conflict is a great point. But doesn't this kind of prove that there has to be more than one viewpoint, one "mind" if you want, to make a story?

kickingtheground, thanks, in which story?
posted by dnial at 8:07 AM on April 23

Do plants count as beings?

Does evidence of society--like the simple presence of modern buildings, computers, clothes, automobiles, and other technology that a being alone could not replicate--count?
posted by Nonce at 8:17 AM on April 23

I thought Jack London had done this in To Build a Fire, but there is another character, the dog. (and the boys waiting at the camp and the old timer of Sulpher Creek if you want to get really technical)
posted by jrishel at 8:21 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]

Hatchet is really similar to this. I mean there happen to be some characters other than the protagonist in it but they aren't absolutely necessary. It's about a kid surviving in the wild.
posted by I Foody at 8:22 AM on April 23

dnial: True, you'd have to cut off the last two rows, but that portion seems to be more of the punchline of the joke than anything specific to the story of the single character and the rocks.
posted by odinsdream at 8:31 AM on April 23

Right, but what if you had a first-person story about a guy trapped on a lifeless distant planet? It would be Man vs. Nature.
posted by Kirklander at 8:39 AM on April 23

Theodore Sturgeon's short story The Man Who Lost the Sea comes pretty close to this.
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:05 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]

I only just noticed that the wikipedia entry you linked to, Kirklander, indeed says: "Conflict is a necessary element of fictional literature."

But the xkcd comic, without the last two rows, seems to disprove this ;) I thought that it would be easier in a technical context.

Nonce, I would not count plants, but I would count traces of society to some extent, maybe not if that society is history and the traces are not connected to their origins...

In a pure Human vs. Nature story, I guess the nature almost naturally will become at least somewhat metaphysical, what do you think?
posted by dnial at 9:05 AM on April 23

Seconding jrishel - Jack London's works usually fall in this vein - when he does mention other beings, it's pretty incidental, and the story would work just fine without those references.

Also, there is a section of Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in which a whale is suddenly brought into being in the upper atmosphere and contemplates its solitary existence until it hits the ground:

It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a Sperm Whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet and since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity. This is what it thought, as it fell:

The Whale: Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my... well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a... tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what's this roaring sound, whooshing past what I'm suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It'll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I'm dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There's an awful lot of that now isn't it? And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me? Hello Ground!
[dies]
posted by Salvor Hardin at 9:17 AM on April 23 [3 favorites]

I'd say the answer to your actual question is therefore "yes". It is definitely possible to do this, since many stories listed here could certainly be edited to submit to your stringent requirements without significant loss of literary value.

Your question is closely related Solipsism - the idea that your mind is the only thing that can be definitively proven to exist by you; all other minds could be clever figments of your own feverish imagination. It is the philosophical realization of the extreme solitude that you wish to describe in a story.

Also, many creation myths start out as this type of story - first there was nothing, then there was some kind of god, who was alone, then god created other stuff. But for an eternity there before creation, that god was alone.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 9:27 AM on April 23

the xkcd link doesnt disprove conflict's neccesity, at least if you are willing to be liberal with what constitues "conflict." In that story, the initial "conflict" is boredom, though it's obviously the response to the conflict rather than the conflict itself that is interesting.
posted by milestogo at 9:36 AM on April 23

Sounds a lot like the middle section of the movie Cast Away.
posted by hippybear at 9:51 AM on April 23

hippy, I'd disagree in that Tom Hanks' character anthropomorphizes Wilson, which breaks the poster's rule: "no imagined people".

Fun thought exercize!
posted by pkphy39 at 10:32 AM on April 23

Thanks everyone for the answers!

I was actually thinking about quite the opposite of Solipsism - about the essential ( - or not?) necessity of the social or at least any interpersonal relation, now thanks to you better defined as some kind of conflict, for the creation of any interesting story.

For me, the closest to a counter-evidence might be Adams' great whale story - but still, I find it interesting that even this whale seems desperate to find a counterpart in that 'opponent in his ultimate conflict' (scnr) to make itself "real".

So to be honest I still think that modifying those stories and editing out any relation to anyone else would indeed hurt their literary "value" quite a lot.

On preview: thanks pkphy39 ;)
posted by dnial at 11:00 AM on April 23

"no clues to the results of actions of any other life-forms"

How broadly are you defining this? If your sole character is a human and, say, eats anything, then that implicates the fact that humans have been cultivating crops (and/or domesticating animals) for many millennia. Likewise if s/he wears clothing, reads a book, etc.
posted by DavidNYC at 11:55 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]

One of the first things I learned about literature was that there were only three story types: Man against Man, Man against Nature, and Man against Himself.

Only one of those requires another person.

A simple example would be a story of a person climbing a mountain. If you want to double it: A person who is afraid of heights climbing a mountain.
posted by Ookseer at 11:56 AM on April 23

David, yeah! true if you count learned behavior, even unnoticed by the character and the author, this makes it completely impossible and obvious.

Climbing a mountain.. why would an alone being be afraid? Sometimes because it doesn't know that. But there has to be a story about it, and relations that make it interesting I guess...

ok /obvious, sry a broad question thx!
posted by dnial at 1:24 PM on April 23

It depends on what you define as a "character". Even an inanimate object can become a character in a story (the ground in the whale story, Wilson in Castaway) if your main character anthropomorphizes it. Not to get too froo froo lala on you, but every story has at least two characters, the writer and you. Even if the story is about a calm pond, you'll always know that someone wrote it and the person who wrote it knew (or hoped) that there would be readers.

I guess if you wrote an autobiography and included no other characters but yourself and you were the only one who read it, that could count.
posted by runcibleshaw at 1:18 AM on April 25 [1 favorite]

Fulfilling the letter if not the spirit of the request: there's a Heinlein story from the forties called "By His Bootstraps", in which there's quite a lot of dramatic tension, protagonist and antagonist(s) having animated discussions, getting into fights, etc.... except that it turns out that all the characters are in fact the same person at different points in an extremely convoluted time-stream.
posted by sesquipedalia at 8:41 PM on April 26