On People, Fictional and Otherwise

I've spent my winter break watching M*A*S*H.

I was raised on this show.  It ended four years before I was born.  My mom watched it when it first came on, and it's always been one of her favourite shows.  I have known the tune of the theme song for my entire life--it's right up there with the Andy Griffith theme and the Cheers theme for songs that will forever be locked in my brain.  I can blame Hawkeye for why I'm attracted to dark-haired men with weird senses of humour.  In fact, I'm pretty certain that if I sat down and thought about it, a lot of aspects of my personality could be traced to this show. (I know that more of my original character Dameon is based on Hawkeye than I ever realised; little things kept popping up along the way, and I'd realise much later it was something Hawk had said or done.)  We own all but the last season on DVD.  And I've spent my fall break watching the first seven.

Admittedly, I'm not watching them exactly in order.  I started with seven, then watched six and five, then started on season one about a week and a half ago.  I just finished season three last night.

If you've never seen the series, I want to know what rock you've been living under, first of all, but if you really aren't familiar with it, season three ends with an episode called "Abyssinia, Henry".  The episode is about the unit's commanding officer, Henry Blake, getting his discharge papers and preparing to go home.  At the end of the episode, you find out that his plane out of Korea was shot down, and that Henry, along with all others on board, was killed.  I've seen the episode more than a dozen times, probably, over my lifetime.  I know this episode.  I know what happens.  In a lot of ways, that makes it worse, but after having seen it so many times, I should at least be somewhat desensitised to Henry's death.  I watched the episode last night, and I cried.  I cry every single time I see the episode.  It's not the only episode of M*A*S*H that makes me cry; it's certainly not the only one that affects me emotionally so profoundly.

I was struck by the realisation last night that I have cried more over Henry Blake's death than I did over my own grandfather's death this summer.  At first, it seemed a callous thing, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I have always been more deeply affected by fiction than real life.  I don't think it's necessarily that I don't care about real people, but I think it's a testament to the fact that we can never truly know one another.  Even as author John Green advises us to "imagine people complexly", I think it is far easier to relate to and to imagine complexly fictional people than those with whom we have daily interactions.

I'm not saying I care more about Henry Blake than I did about my grandfather.  But I do think that on some level, that might be more true than I care to admit.  With fictional characters, we get more of a window into their lives than we ever do with real people.  We can see what affects them in their most private moments.  We are privy to their secrets and their darkest flaws. We are witness to their mistakes and humiliations.  We partake in their joys and excitement.  Some of the boundaries put in place by the very nature of reality are broken down when we are presented with a well-created fictional character, just as some of the boundaries we put on ourselves may be broken down when we create our own.

I wouldn't be the first person to claim that I put a piece of myself into all of my characters.  And I wouldn't be the first to claim that I see myself in characters others create, either, which I think is why I love M*A*S*H so much.  But I'm thinking now, and not in a worrisome way, about whether I invest more interest in those I feel intimately familiar with, like Hawkeye Pierce, than I do in those I know I will never know completely--or complexly, probably--like my mother or my best friend.  And that should worry me.

It's a strange place to be when I start aspiring to know my friends like I know the people at the 4077th.