The text is, a person?

The creation of a text is, according to the Phenomenologist’s we have studied, the creation of a living organism. Ideologies, emotions, all aspects of a thinking thing become expressed through this medium that is created for an audience. In the film, Stranger than Fiction, this becomes quite literal. Similar to Sartre and Barthes views on writing, this film becomes the literal embodiment of their metaphorical philosophies. Harry is a living, breathing text. He is the creation of someone else’s doing. He goes nearly his entire life without ever being conscious of himself as a text, until one day when he overhears his life being narrated by the author of what is essential his ‘novel’. This symbolism goes hand in hand with the Phenomenologist’s rhetoric and ideologies. Sartre stated that: “the literary object is a peculiar top which exists only in movement. The writer neither foresees nor conjectures; he projects.” The author of Harry’s novel isn’t writing, but projecting the feelings, the dealings, of his life outward unto him. It is the blend of them both, the partnership they manifest that brings life not only to Harry but consequently back to the text. Similarly, Barthes idea of the death of the author commences at the birth of the reader is perhaps another idea that is visited in Stranger than Fiction. Up until the onset of Harry’s discovery of the voice, the author has been writing nonstop and with success. Then comes the realization of Harry; the birth of the reader. With this awakened consciousness, the writer has now hit a block. She can no longer write- she becomes irrelevant. Her relevance was only needed up until the point of a conscious text. Once Harry has become aware of involvement he takes full control of the text. This not only brings the two together in a twist of textual collaboration but it consequently clouds the author and gives birth to the text.

Works Cited

Leitch, Vincent B. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: