As I work on my fantasy series, I think about the central nature of the protagonist and how the story pivots around the pole of his being. Can a story have more than one pole, one essence, one essential nature? If not, then does that mean that each book/novel/story is a singular entity with the cast of characters and events playing out across the spectrum of his being? If we look at the novel as a living entity what do we see. Words at play with themselves as an unfolding. But they do more. These words, in their arrangement, enter into the reader in ways that encounter The Other [sic] as an extending out toward. Unlike human to human interaction, in this case, it is words’ textualness extending out toward the reader/being/entity who is open. It is this openness that comports the reader as The Other toward himself. He can only see these words as a reflecting back upon himself. It is this recursive nature of reading that brings us to ourselves. However, it is an uncanniness that we encounter because the murmur of the author is also at play in the language of the story.

This is why one author is prized while another is not.

When it is a recursive reflecting splayed out across our being, we get a delving into ourselves that is not possible in any other fashion. This is the gift that the writer writes to us. We are given a piece of ourselves by the author in a timelessness (that is here the novel resides–outside of time) that ripples ever outward in the liquid play of language.

So, I return to the protagonist. Can stories have a multiplicity of protagonists? Can there be chaos? OR does it/the novel have to always have a focus of individuality? It seems to me that in the current accepted structure there can only be one protagonist. It is his/her/their/our/we/us story. Individualized and compartmentalized – the story is a singular being living out its days in the multiplicity of interpretations.

It is this oneness that allows it to become many to us as we change and grow. We re-read it again and again, seeing facets gone unnoticed until now…now..now. The now of the re-read. If there were multiple or a multiplicity of protagonists where would the agent and agency be?

I think I agree that each story can/should/may only have one protagonist with a panoply of others as supporting identities (Ref: Carl Jung archetypes in the psyche) of the singular being. Is it then the case that the totality of all things occurring in the novel are in fact merely facets of one person? That even the antagonist is merely another identity of the protagonist? Is Moriarty merely Holmes as an emergence of a different facet of the self?

Possibly,

Still, we do crave texts that sing to us across the distance of language at play. That is good writing.