Summary
Harold goes to a psychiatrist, who diagnoses his condition as schizophrenia. He disagrees, saying, “it’s not schizophrenia, it’s just a voice in my head.” The psychiatrist looks confused as Harold explains that the voice isn’t telling him what to do; rather it is telling him “what I’ve done, accurately, and with a better vocabulary.” He tells her it’s like he’s a character in his own life, but that the voice “comes and goes,” and that he isn’t getting all the information. “Before the story concludes with your death,” the psychiatrist notes, once again deliberating that Harold is schizophrenic. When he asks what he can do other than take medication, the psychiatrist recommends he talk to someone “who knows about literature.”
Harold visits with a literature professor, Jules Hilbert. Reviewing Harold’s situation, Jules asks him if he’s crazy, noting that Harold was counting the steps in the hallway. Jules asks him about himself, and more about the narrator. When Harold tells him the narrator is a woman, Jules wants to know if it’s someone Harold knows, and he tells him it’s not. Harold explains the situation, and the fact that the narrator has been right about many elements of his life, which is why he’s worried she’s right about his imminent death. “If I told you you were gonna die, would you believe me?” Jules asks him, and when Harold says no, because he doesn’t know him, Jules points out: “You don’t know this narrator either.”
“I can’t help you,” Jules tells him, explaining that he’s an expert in literary theory, and that “there doesn’t seem to be a single literary thing about [Harold].” He continues, “I don’t doubt you hear a voice, but it couldn’t possibly be a narrator, because frankly there doesn’t seem to be much to narrate.” As he dismisses Harold, Jules suggests he keep a journal of what he hears and Harold tells him about the narrator’s prophecy of his death, a sentence that begins, “Little did he know…” Suddenly, Jules is intrigued, telling Harold that he’s written papers and taught classes around the construction, “Little did he know.” He tells him to come back to see him the next day.
Harold rides the bus, where he hears Karen’s narration again. “All the precision of Harold’s life just faded away,” she says, just as Ana Pascal climbs onto the bus. He waves and greets her, but Ana is not happy to see him and goes to the rear of the bus. Harold offers her a seat, but she doesn’t want one. As the bus jolts forward, she falls into a seat near Harold’s and he asks her how she is. “I’m lousy, I’m being audited…by a real creep too,” she says. Harold looks deflated and turns away, before apologizing for his lack of tact and good manners. She accepts his apology and tells him she’s late to a needlepoint group, joking that it’s a politically radical one. When Harold makes a joke, Ana laughs, and he continues making smalltalk. Growing nervous, he gets off the bus too early and realizes he must walk 27 blocks, as Karen narrates his predicament.
We see him brushing his teeth, then setting his alarm on his watch. We then see Jules watching an author talk about his recent novel on television. Harold knocks on his door and enters, and Jules invites him to sit down. Jules tells him he’s made a test for Harold to take so they can discover more about the narrator. After eating some yogurt, Jules begins questioning him about his life, and the questions seem to make explicit reference to various works of literature. Harold stops him to ask why he’s asking such unusual and specific questions and Jules tells Harold that the first way to figure out what story he is in is to determine which story he’s not in, and “I’ve just ruled out half of Greek literature, 7 fairy tales, 10 Chinese fables, and determined conclusively that you are not King Hamlet, Scout Finch, Miss Marple, Frankenstein’s monster, or a golem.” Harold seems skeptical.
We see Karen driving down a rainy street alongside a young boy on a bicycle. When the boy swerves into the road, Karen drives her car over the side of a bridge and into the river below as the boy rides away. The car sinks into the water. Suddenly, we realize that Karen is sitting next to the river with Penny and has only imagined this scenario. “We’re imagining car wrecks,” she tells Penny, who wants to know if they can go inside. When Penny suggests that Karen is at risk for getting pneumonia, Karen realizes that pneumonia might be a good way to kill off Harold Crick. “Have you written anything new today?” Penny asks her and Karen tells her she’s done nothing. When Karen starts coughing, Penny hands her a pamphlet on nicotine patches, but Karen doesn’t want it.
Meanwhile, Jules continues his questionnaire with Harold. “Do you aspire to anything?” he asks, but Harold doesn’t. This stops Jules, who wants to know what Harold’s dream is. When pressed, Harold says he wants his life to be more musical, that he wants to learn the guitar. Jules wants to know if Harold’s life is a comedy or a tragedy, distinguishing that tragedies end in death and comedies in marriage. He asks Harold if he’s met anyone since the narrator appeared who initially hated him, and Harold thinks of Ana, naturally. After he tells Jules about Ana, Jules says, “That sounds like a comedy, try to develop that.”
Harold goes to Ana’s bakery, determined to make his life a comedy. They go in the back and Ana takes out a big box of crumpled up tax files. Harold goes through the chaotic files, and throughout the day he observes how beloved Ana is in her community. At the end of the day, he emerges from the office where he’s been looking at files and finds Ana cleaning up for the day. She offers him a cookie, but he tells her he doesn’t like cookies. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks him and he tells her that he only ever had store bought cookies. She instructs him to sit down and eat a cookie. He eats it and it’s delicious.
Analysis
Jules Hilbert feels he is unable to help Harold because he sees Harold as such an unlikely literary figure. In contrast to the other protagonists and heroes of literature, Harold is exceedingly boring and un-compelling. As a result, Jules deems him unsuitable as a protagonist, and sees this unsuitability as reason enough not to be able to help Harold. He suggests that he would be better able to help Harold if Harold were not just a boring IRS agent, and he assesses Harold’s life as an editor would a manuscript, rather than as a human being would speak to a fellow human being. In this way, Jules is yet another person that turns Harold into a character in his own life; not only that, but he suggests that Harold isn’t even a good or well-written character, and that there is nothing literary about him.
In some ways, the issues that Jules faces in assessing Harold’s life as a work of literature are the same problems that Karen faces in writing the novel of Harold’s life. He sees Harold’s situation as boring, which is exactly what Karen seeks to write her way through, but which makes her job as a novelist that much harder. When Jules tells Harold that the voice in his head “couldn’t possibly be a narrator, because frankly there doesn’t seem to be much to narrate,” this seems like a criticism of Karen as much as it is a criticism of Harold. The author and the protagonist are an unlikely pairing, precisely because literature is concerned with that which is dynamic and interesting, and Harold’s life is anything but. It is only when Harold tells Jules one of the lines that Karen wrote, one which piques Jules’ academic interest, that Jules begins to invest in the novel of Harold’s life.
As disruptive as the intrusion of Karen’s narration is in Harold’s life, it also opens up space in which for him to live with less pedantic precision. In his state of disorientation, Harold is forced to live in the moment, to question his existence more explicitly, and to wonder what he cares about. With Karen’s aid, his humdrum life becomes novelistic, his run-ins more than coincidental, his movements meaningful rather than arbitrary. As Karen narrates on the bus, “All the precision of Harold’s life just faded away,” and we can see that this is a positive change for a man who spends most of his time just going through the motions.
The film plays with the viewer’s expectations at various points in astonishing ways, seemingly to highlight the ways that both Karen and Harold are contending with the unpredictable themes of fate and control. As an echo of the early moment in which we see Karen jumping off the side of a building, in this section of the film, we see Karen swerve off a rainy street and drive her car into a river. As soon as the car has sunk into the water, however, we realize that the event was imagined. Karen is sitting in the rain alongside the river, imagining the tragic event, so that she can use it for her novel. As a novelist, Karen is a kind of morbid actor, an anthropologist of tragedy, and this undertaking seems perfectly aligned with her own depressive temperament. The chain-smoking and combative writer is more at home in his tragic imaginary, in the world of her writing, than she is in her life.
As methodical as it may seem, Karen’s interest in imagining the action of her novels is actually an avoidant technique, a way for her to resist writing and living by burrowing in an insular imaginative world. In this way, she and Harold are not so different, in that they are both drifting through their lives without much resolve. Harold might be a boring IRS officer with a numbers obsession, but Karen is no more vital for being an artist. In fact, she spends most of her time simply smoking and imagining her own death. However romantic and literary this may seem, it is not much less repetitive than the work of an auditor. Thus, author and character share the same problem in Stranger than Fiction: they are both afraid of living their own lives.
