The Character Onion, Not the Satiric One

Because of the way it is formed, the onion may find itself used not only as an ingredient in cooking but literary metaphor as well.  The phrase To peel the onion, suggests the removal of the layers, one by one, with a final destination being the core.  

In many ways, the personalities of persons and characters resemble onions, given the way the layers of each are peeled away by examination.  

The person appears before you in your daily encounters with the world about you.  The character appears in your reading, your critical analysis of what you've read, and your attempts to set characters of your own creation into motion.  

Peeling an onion or constructing one has direct connections for you with Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who was in effect using spare or diverse body parts as ingredients in his attempt to create life via artificial means.

As you read Dr. Frankenstein, your interpretation of his fatal flaw became hubris.  Now, years after you first met him and his works, through unfortunate motion picture ventures, and then through your reading of Mary Shelley's original text, you have arrived at an entirely different vision.  In a collateral sense, this is the same, after-the-fact vision you had of Franz Kafka's character from The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa.

You admire both the works in their original, literary forms.  You also admire their authors. You appreciate having been introduced to them through the mechanism of assigned reading, supplemented with one or more instructor's lecture explications.  You appreciate having been nudged to articulating your own sense of the effect each had on its surrounding society, your interpretation of the author's reason for writing the work, and your articulation of what each work means to you.

How unfortunate to realize your early readings and considerations of the works stopped short of your articulation of what each word meant to you.  At the time of your exposure to each, you were already aware of the concept of the instructor having written and defended at least one thesis.  

You allowed your early decision not to pursue graduate-level study to divert you away from the essential need nevertheless of having a thesis about such things as Dr. Frankenstein's creation or Franz Kafka's characters.  Indeed, you allowed your decision to seek your fortune as a writer become an irony injected into what you like to think of now as a long, deliberate make-up examination in the taking of which you were once again peeling the onion of yourself.

The irony you see now is the way you jumped into your own work without examining your own thesis about much of anything.  You did this in the belief that you were prepared enough.  You were prepared, but in the defended theses of others.  You went forth in a real sense all onion and no tears.

You did not at the time think Dr. Frankenstein would have had greater experiences had he become a writer.  What a remarkable and, in fact, more difficult way to create life than he chose.  Kafka was closer to the mark; he created a riotous and comedic response to his negative feelings about his father by creating a circumstance where the elder Samsa was forced to care for his son, now transformed into a bug.

Without making a direct association, you often use the analogy of an individual or a character as an armature of agenda or desire, about which layers of constraints, inhibitions, and fearful experiences are wrapped.

Onion or armature, you see characters now as some force embedded within a field of irony.  There is struggle, transference of power, tidal surges, and moments of great understanding, all illuminating that field of play.

Opening Paragraphs and Hidden Agendas

Finding the beginning of a story or of a chapter within a story is like a drunk, trying to fit the correct house key into the door lock.  You know this because you, while drunk, have experienced the frustration of getting the lock to remain stationary, and while sober, you've tried to get the sentence you knew was there, but was not quite ready to reveal itself to you.

When you stop to think about the multifarious range of elements needed for openings, your head spins as it has done on occasion when you had too much to drink.  Sometimes, to get the process moving, you use a note pad to list the necessary things for the beginning.  Start with someone relevant, if not he or she who will become the main character.

This is often a lucrative step because he or she wants or needs something,  He or she must, in your opinion, be a bit off plumb, having wanted and striven in the past with at best a string of near misses.  This introduces a note of desperation or sense of fatalism.  (A trapeze artist who has been dropped on occasion becomes suspicious of shaking hands.)

The beginning must have a setting.  Through the years, you've understood the need to give the setting a personality that somehow causes the reader if not the reader and characters a sense of discomfort.  

One way to accomplish this is to imagine some interior flaw such as a clogged drain, a dripping faucet, an infestation of termites, perhaps even something as fanciful as a squatter, living in some unnoticed space.  You will not mention this flaw nor will you allow your characters to refer to it.

Suffice it to be an active, imaginative flaw, tucked away in your vision of the place so that your awareness of it will effect the way you see the place, which will be transferred to the way the characters sense something amiss.  "Is it all right to sit here?"  "Yes, of course.  Why would you even ask?"  "I'm not sure.  There's something uncertain here, as though it were in use by someone who will return at any minute."

This is one of your defining characteristics.  Your primary character sits at a table in a coffee shop, waiting for an important rendezvous.  Someone in a nearby table asks the character if she/he will please watch his/her table for a moment.  The primary character agrees.  His/her appointment arrives, takes one look at the surroundings, then insists they leave.  The primary character is bound by the promise made to watch the table and books or laptop computer or backpack or even a rolling suitcase.  

The appointment person grows impatient.  "We  have to leave now."  But as they start to leave, the primary character already feeling guilty for having broken a promise to a complete stranger, requests five more minutes.  When the five minutes have expired, the two start to the door, which is blocked by the police.  The person from the nearby table, the one who asked for the primary to watch his/her things, will have been murdered.

The appointment person nudges the primary character.  "I told you we had to leave."  We do not know what's going on, but we do suspect the appointment person of having been the one to have dispatched the person from the nearby table.

Additional to characters and setting, beginnings require some sense of impending disaster, some outrageous irony, some twist of fate.  Even so, the beginning requires a sense of some pattern the reader senses, some causal force behind the events.

The more aspects of presence you think to braid into your beginning, the more daunting the beginning comes.  You appreciate all the more the metaphor of the trunk, fumbling with his keys. The only way out of the situation is for you, in your desperation to get the story off and running, is another complication.

You have at least two avenues open before you.  In the metaphor of the drunk, trying to gain entry to his home, how about a neighbor, equally drunk, appears, confesses to our drunk that she can't get her door open, and would our person please, please help.  On the other hand, the prime character is now being questioned by the police, who wonder why his/her name was in the pocket of the deceased.

For the longest time, you believed you could not plot.  During that long time, you'd have given anything for these ruminations.  But even then, you knew your way around an opening sentence.

The Interior Editorial Meeting

During various times in your life, you've heard a person asked, "What's your story?"  Almost as various as the times you've heard the question asked, and indeed, even when it was asked of you, the question and the answer had different meanings.

On one of the occasions the question was directed at you, the most probable meaning was, "Why are you behaving this way?" Of equal probability, you may not have known, following some script from an aspect of your personality with whom you had little commerce.

"What's your story?" can also be a synonym for "What's with you?" another way of questioning intent, behavior, or both.  Sometimes, when the you is shifted to another pronoun, the question asks for some quick description of a person's goals, general behavior, or at-the-moment behavior.

Not long after you began edging toward your preferred life's work, you began to assess the possibility that everyone had a story.  With this in mind, you began to take mental notes, wondering what the story was so far as persons who interested you were concerned.  

This led you to a plateau of discovery.  Persons whose story interested you were either more eccentric than you,, took even more chances than you took, or wanted tangible things more than you.  This is not to say these individuals wanted material things so much as they wanted things you associated with stature.

For your part, you were becoming aware of wanting to enhance your sphere of understanding how things and people, work.  This led to a moment in your own history of growth and development where you recognized an emerging problem, all the characters who populated your stories spoke like you, wanted the same kinds of things you wanted, and seemed to have the same kind of background you had.

Among other things, this led you to weekly visits with a man who had an office on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, a street once reputed to have more psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists than any other street in the world.  The man you visited was named Arthur.  He had a trimmed mustache, an enormous take of tropical fish, and a way of making you feel he'd be disappointed if you were looking for ways to avoid talking about things that troubled you.

In consequence of you not wishing to disappoint Arthur, you spoke of such story-related things as you'd observed from the "What's your story?" question, including investigations and strategies for trying to expand your background, your understanding of individuals with stories, and your desire to add more diversity to your story.

Fortunate for you, at the time, you were a student at a university with a wider canvas of diversity   than you were used to.  This meant a broader number of individuals wanted to know what your story was, which was somewhat daunting because you were still not sure.  But a small segment began to express interest in your imagined and pretend stories.

At yet another plateau, more focused than even on your goal of wishing to have your entire income appear as a result of the stories you wrote, you became involved with two distractions, each of which you found to your liking.  Both had directly to do with the products of writing.  Each brought you in contact with yet greater diversity, often in heated contact with forces that would enhance your discovery of what your own story is.  Each of these distractions, editorial and teaching, gave you an approach you've begun to appreciate.

Editorial meetings are sometimes rancorous and frustrating, but rarely boring.  Faculty meetings are often rancorous and frustrating, but in mitigation, always boring.  That said, you could go on attending them until you were no longer capable of movement; each has given you story, diversity, energy, and a greater sense of what your story is.

From your experiences in publishing, there can rarely be a new, exciting project without at least one meeting.  From your experience in teaching, you experience ideas for new stories and awareness of which courses you yearn to teach, the payoff being you yearn to teach courses where you need to learn, assimilate, and forge your own vision.

The takeaway is the frequency with which you have to hold your own meetings, which means all the recognizable aspects of you are present, each to have his or her say, if he or she wishes.  Of the many things you admired about the television drama, The Wire, as you watched it and now as you relive it in memory, you think of Russell "Stringer" Bell, a drug kingpin, second in command to Avon Barksdale, the boss.  Bell was an ardent believer in preparedness and system.  He ran the meetings of the Baltimore drug dealers with strict observance of Roberts' Rules of Order.

Your own meetings are no less formal.  They often take as rancorous a turn as editorial and faculty meetings, but no one, not your internal editor or the resident cynic are allowed to be interrupted.  They get their say. Neither you nor the others are allowed to shout them down or boo and hiss.  This system works well enough, although, to be fair, you do have an in with the chairman.

I Wouldn't Put It Past You

 With some frequency, you find yourself reminding your students how at least fifty-five percent of a story has to take place in the present.  In doing you, you are passing on a sincere and informed belief, but you are also reminding yourself how most story has roots in the past but must be played out with a significant presence in the immediate now.

There is some pleasure in reminding students and self how this observation was held at conservative least, eight hundred or so years before the common era.  You are thinking of The Iliad, which, in its first line, calls our attention to the wrath of Achilles.  Whether or not we know of the story behind The Iliad, and the long siege of Troy, who among us has not heard of the Achilles heel in reference to a classic sort of vulnerability?  Knowing of the heel, we have some awareness of the street cred and prowess of the man.

Of the many reasons we can cite for The Iliad beginning when and where it does, an obvious one is because of the way it tells us we are in year seven of the siege, the numbers of dead are increasing, and many of the various forces involved are growing tired of it, tired of the reasons behind it, and tired of the relentless consequences to follow if the siege continues.

Contemporary stories are bound by the same dramatic conventions, as they relate to time management and a tendency among emerging writers to want to find ways to tell us of the past before introducing us to characters in the present.  

Many of us have embedded within their reading history memories of plays in which a chorus appears to present a hint of what the story is all about.  Some of these chorus-type beginnings date back to ancient Greece, others, borrowing from that tradition give us variations on a theme.

Consider Shakespeare's Henry V, where a chorus appears to tell us how great the appetite and agenda of King Henry was to contest the ownership of France.  But.  " But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vast fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt? "

This is well thought apology for not having the scenery and grand effects necessary to portray the battles that actually took place, and so, we ask you to use your imagination for the battles we knew took place back in the day.  An excellent use of apology for not having a broader stage than 'this wooden O."

The historical information leading up to the conditions, disposition and agenda of the characters, and the surrounding tensions, relates to matters of the past, thus the name backstory.  Some accomplished contemporary writers, and any number of emerging contemporary writers use their early readings to justify the presentation of a modern story with a detailed backstory to set the scene and engage the reader's attentions and sympathy.

Evolution being what it is, we will pardon writers of the past for the conventions of the fast they followed.  You were pleased to be editor of a book on the Cro-Magnon species, written and published in this century by an author who found no need to apologize for the species, rather instead making the work a paean to their adaptability and resourcefulness.  In the bargain, he showed how, in fact, some individuals tend to regard the Cro-Magnon and their Neanderthal predecessors as witless, as savages, as less productive and substantial as they were.

Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon were steps along a path of evolution.  Choruses and long, historical set-up, including long descriptions, were steps along a path of literary evolution.  With one or two exceptions, you could start most of the novels of the considerable poet/writer, Thomas Hardy, somewhere in the middle of Chapter One if not at the beginning of Chapter Two.  Even the most notorious exception among Hardy's novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge, trod slowly along the path to its still shocking and powerful Chapter One conclusion.

Of course characters of consequence have backstory, some of them quite elaborate in direct proportion to the consequence the past will have on their behavior in the present.  But if that backstory, often told through the filter of compound verbs and more complex tenses than the mere immediacy of the declarative sentence in the present indicative, requires too many compound verbs--ha had gone, she might have gone, he could possibly have gone, etc--the modern reader will resent the apparent distance between herself and the characters.

If, in L.P.Hartley's novel, The Go-Between, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, you can toy with the notion of how, from the perspective of the present, a novel's narrative retains its freshness and relevance or begins to slip back into techniques and conventions of other times, where in one way or several, the authorial presence mediated between reader and story, allowing the author to send the equivalent of notes to the reader.

The past can and should haunt all characters; it for certain haunts you, in relation to things you did or did not do, things you did or did not understand, and things you wished for then that you may regret having achieved or thank the fates you did not acquire.

With another nod to Hartley, the past is indeed a foreign country from which you have emerged, in your choice of the kind of tour guide Mark Twain made such fun of in The Innocents Abroad, or the inexperienced and naive travelers, who believe too many of the wrong facts and not enough of the correct ones.

The True Beauty Is in the Story

The learning process is a true balance between the teacher and the pupil, where you often find it difficult to assess which, the learner or the learnee, has come away with the most benefit.  You have no qualms about going into a situation as a pupil, particularly if you've sought out the class, the teacher, and the subject, then enrolled.

Qualms do not enter the picture when you are a teacher and your after-the-fact assessment is of the class having been a successful one, exciting and fun to teach.  This is your recognition that you've made discoveries that energize, excite, and inspire you, often to the point where some new project will emerge or some ongoing problem, hanging in limbo, has now been resolved.

You at the moment all too aware of the times in your career when eighty or ninety percent of your working day as an editor had to do with material bound for publication.  Your own perception of it had been augmented by hearing individuals whose focus related to sales and promotion, possibly even from artists designing the cover.  

This awareness was out to trial this past weekend when, knowing in advance what you were getting into, you participated in a writers' conference, where you hosted a three-hour course in writing the modern short story, then interviewed a highly polished and professional mystery writer, then moderated a panel of literary agents, three of whom you knew from your own days as an editor. 

On day two of the conference, you were paired with a former senior editor, now a literary agent, for a five-hour intensive course which had the advertised goal of raising the participants writing skills to at least the next highest plateau on the mountain of professionalism.  In all your interactions, you knew the conversation would be stopped at least once when the topic ran toward revision and the editorial process.  

You accepted the invitation to attend and participate in the conference knowing at least one person would dig his or her heels in the editorial stand with a pronouncement.  "I don't care.  I love the language.  I write for the beauty and music and cadence of the language.  I write for the beauty of the metaphor and simile, and the overall beauty of effect the sweep and flow of language can have."

The awaited or, perhaps you should say dreaded moment came when your presentation arrived at what specifics could be removed from specific manuscripts without harming and instead enhancing the story at hand.  The classroom was carpeted.  You could not, therefore, hear the student's heels digging in, but you could see the look on her face as she, in an increase of passionate focus, spoke the words quoted directly above.

You heard her out, hoping your nodding response conveyed sympathy and understanding.  In your heart, you knew you were being typecast.  Enemy.  Philistine. Even worse, commercial.  After all, hadn't you once worked for a massmarket publisher?  Hadn't you, at one sales meeting, presented a title with your reckoned sales potential for one hundred fifty thousand copies, only to be reminded by your immediate superior, "You know, don't you, that when we say massmarket, we're thinking at least a half million copies, preferably a million?"

"Can anyone in this room,"  you said, turning to make eye contact with as many in the audience as possible, "name me a writer who sets out with deliberation to write clunky, awkward prose that grates on the readers' sensibility?"

Your adversary would have none of your implication.  "If a story doesn't have beauty, it really isn't a story."

You were right there with a comeback.  "If a narrative has too much beauty, it really isn't a story."
This led to what in your experience in such matters you've come to ascribe to the last-ditch plateau of desperation.  "Then I'd hate to see what you consider beautiful storytelling."

Ha, ha.  Gotcha.  Whether fair or not, you have stored in memory the first stanza of a poem by John Keats, whom you admire, and which represents to you not only vivid beauty and presence but simultaneous story.  

 ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
  And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
  Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told         
  His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
  Like pious incense from a censer old,
  Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Pretty good for a philistine.

Sometimes we tend to forget the beauty in the simple, direct evocation of circumstance and the writer's passion for the story at hand.

Story in Chaos, Chaos in Story

Even if there is clutter, the clutter is yours, belongs to you, had its origins in your disregard for established order.  Clutter settles into a pattern, much the same as random elements melding at length into story, or in the way that story sometimes settles into a clutter, wanting a guiding hand.

Look at it.  See how the clutter reflects you, drawing the parallel again between the way your stories reflect you.  Whether clutter or story, the shape and form are of your making.  You can, in fact, read clutter as though it were text, in ways no one else can, even edit it by removing or replacing an element.  

Pick any specific point in the clutter about you, approach it, listen to it.  No sooner than you do so, a vision forms in your mind of an action, a moment of setting something aside, perhaps to gain access to another, perhaps even to set something down without giving it another thought while your focus was being drawn, lured elsewhere.

Isn't that what clutter is, a trail of jetsam occasioned by distractions?  Doesn't that make the background music to clutter into the Siren's song of the promise of some new attraction?

Much of your clutter involves books, newspapers, journals, and magazines.  Their arrangements are less suggestions of scheme and order than of specific projects, which themselves are other aspects of clutter.  Work-in-progress is clutter until it has definition.  With increased definition, the distinction between the project and the sawdust become more manifest.

You live with the recognition that you live in a clutter of one sort or another, deployed against a larger chaos.  Your goal is to refine design and pattern, to seek some exterior perspective from where you can see the cold beauty of your clutter as the cameras of orbiting or implanted satellites see you in ways you cannot see yourself.

Clutter is piles of notebooks and notepads, pocket-sized and larger, filled with incursions into orbiting ideas, both a reproof for the sheer size and bulk of it and a polar sense of being pleased at the tangible proof of your efforts to capture the equivalent of various shards of lightning in various bottles, indicative of your attempts to visualize some constellation of stars, some vibrant design, or to capture the lines flowing and ebbing tides live on shoreline sand and whatever else comes into their path.

You recognize as well how, if there were no clutter, you would be a different person, perhaps taking pleasure in structure and order rather than trying to locate and establish tides and patterns amid the chaos. 

From your observation of others and from reading, you recognize there are personality types who can visualize a structure or pattern in its complete or near complete form.  When you find admirable works from persons you know to have this ability, you are often so taken with the work that you are unable to leave it.  You carry it around in your mind and your imagination; it may even appear somehow in your dreams, often as a puzzle, a matter to be solved.

So far as you are concerned, clutter is the source, actual and metaphorical.  Now that you think about it, there is one project you recall that came to you at a time when you were more interested in being prolific than learning.  You wrote the novel almost as you dreamed it, with enough time left over that month to allow you to try your hand at a few short stories.

Now, it is not so much that you have become used to and defend clutter as it is that you have made one of the transitions you wished for.  You and the clutter are interchangeable.  Lupe, the maid, could come in on a Monday morning and identify the clutter as yours and no one else's because she has known you these many years and because she knows you live alone.

But a stranger with an archaeological or crime scene background could see you in your clutter, even set down those numbered markers to indicate specific placement of evidence.  1.  Half-filled coffee cup.  Probably set down here while looking over at 2. this particular pile of books, all of which appear to have something to do with nineteenth century literature.  3.  Half-eaten PNBJ sandwich, set next to #4., a scattering of noir fiction.  He probably set the sandwich down while looking for a specific title, 5., which he found and then began to read here, 6. right next to the PNB stain.

From your clutter and your observations of it, this added observation:  Your writing is about the pursuit of attractive concepts that become attached to orbiting information that transforms you and what you're working on, surprises you with a discovery which, in the process of sharing, you surprise yourself even more by learning something beyond what you'd hoped to learn.

Strength of Character or of His Budweiser Tallboy?

An individual you know from your lurking hours at a coffee shop, with whom you are on a first-name basis, and who is wheel-chair bound, catches the wheel of his chair on some unseen obstacle.  The chair tilts, then falls, spilling the man onto the pavement.  You call out his name, ask if he wishes help.  He is emphatic.  "Thank you, no," spoken as though punctuated with an exclamation point.

Nevertheless, two other individuals rush to his side, one of them righting the wheelchair.  "Please stand back,"  the fallen man says.  "Please respect my wishes."

The man who righted the wheel chair says, "But you need help."

"No, thank you, I don't." the fallen man says.  He begins to roll into a sitting position, from which he is able to reach the wheelchair, bring it toward him, then begin to lever himself to a posture from which he can slide into the wheelchair with ease.  His ordeal is not over, the second man, appearing to be shaking with what you interpret as an eagerness to help, approaches, places his hands under the fallen man's armpits, then begins to lift.  "Here,"  he says, "just relax.  I've got it."

"Won't you please step back?"  the fallen man says, managing to shake free from the second man's grip.  With one adroit shift of his body weight, he is now seated in his wheelchair.

The second man appears agitated.  "I was just trying to help."

"You didn't listen to me.  I didn't need help.  I know I could have asked and I know what to do if I am alone and need help.  I appreciate the concern.  I appreciate your willingness."

The man who attempted to right the fallen wheelchair now approaches the second man, speaks to him.  "Aw, come on,"   he says.  "He's the kind of person who's probably sue us for trying to help."

The man in the wheelchair, who drives a late model Mercedes-Benz which he bought from his earnings, does not need to sue people who are trying to help.  Rather, he provides, from the scene you witnessed, a stark scenario involving an unplanned accident, and offered help, a polite and thankful acknowledgment of help and a wish to cope with the circumstances.

This is one example of the social contract at work and your wondering if the fallen man should have accepted the offer of help out of consideration for his would-be rescuers or, as he wished, cope with the problem according to his perception of how he could do so by himself.

Not long after that event, as you sat in another coffee shop, a man approached you, apologized for interrupting your concentration (you were writing in longhand on a legal pad) by saying, "Sorry to interrupt your writing, but I just had to tell you something."

You looked up, smiled, nodded encourage for him to tell you the something he had to tell you.  Not many sentences later, he was thanking you for your last book which, he assured you, changed his life.  His tone told you his intentions were cordial and complementary.  Within a few more sentences, you knew he'd mistaken you for someone else, in fact a writer for whom you have less admiration than scorn.

His appreciation was tangible enough to cause you a qualm.  If you were now to alert him to the mistaken identity, you ran the risk of embarrassing him.  Seeing the position you were now in, you realized how to deal with the problem in an ethical way.  Speaking, as it were, for the author for whom you were mistaken and do not especially care for, you invited him closer, reminded him of one of your favored writers, Bertrand Russell, who was allowing himself to grow or evolve from one approach to another with a rapidity you admired.  

You then spoke of how you had changed your views from the thrust he'd described into one you felt to be more reasonable.  Still being the advocate for the writer you do not appreciate, you thanked his reader for approaching you as he had.  In consequence, he'll always believe he achieved bonding contact with a favorite writer, one who took the time to hang out with him for a while before the need to return to his handwritten notes.

This encounter also demonstrates the concern for not allowing a fellow human to embarrass himself any more than he ordinarily might, yet simultaneously blurring the lines of contact and honesty, nevertheless.

One last example from many relevant to this discussion:  While walking through a funky portion of downtown Ventura, you saw a man propped against the side of a building, asleep, passed out, or engaged in some Transcendental reverie, a tall boy of Budweiser between his legs.  You were aware of the kind of moral obligation you're pleased to recognize and even more pleased when you act on it.  You drew the conclusion that the man was indeed passed out rather than pursuing any meditative state.  Should you have stopped, crouched nearby, roused the man to inquire, Are you asleep, drunk, or in some meditative state?

From your own experiences with these conditions, you factored in your potential for irritation were you brought to consciousness by someone asking you these questions.  Although more often than not at some distance from you now, you recalled the times before being discharged from the hospital by being awakened from the most soothing and pleasurable remove from pain and discomfort relative to having cancerous tissue removed from you, then factored in the results as a part of your decision to allow the leaning man to sleep or meditate onward.

These three examples--three robins do not make a spring--of behavior and its lack, of moral choice, of obligation, and, at the least, respect for individual decisions and dignity,  They should also obtain for characters, creations of your imagination, to be sure, but individuals nevertheless whom you would set forth as participants in story.  You would also hope for readers to see these characters set in similar positions where moral, social, and ethical choices were involved.