Who is the fictional character you relate to the most?
At seventeen, while reading Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, I wanted to be Lazarus Long. I admired his independence, his curiosity, and the idea that one lifetime could contain many different lives. Here was a man who reinvented himself over two thousand years, mastering new skills, careers and cultures. His attitudes towards women were very much of the period in which Heinlein was writing, but the underlying idea—that you should never stop learning or changing—has stayed with me ever since.
Around eighteen, like so many of my generation, I identified with Luke Skywalker: the young man discovering that there was a larger world beyond the one he knew, and that he might have a place in shaping it.
Other characters have resonated at different times. Pip, in Great Expectations, painfully navigating his feelings for Estella, captured the bewilderment of first love and the tendency to confuse aspiration with affection. And in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, it wasn’t Bazarov I found myself identifying with most, but Arkady, particularly in his gentle relationship with Fenichka. There is a warmth and humanity there that stands in quiet contrast to youthful certainty and intellectual posturing.
Perhaps that’s the answer. I don’t have one fictional character I relate to most. Different books have found me at different ages, and each has reflected back something I was trying to become—or understand—at the time.
Leave a Reply