Somebody's Story: Character After the Digital

Abstract

Digital culture and the internet have changed our relationship to veracity—we can be both more truthful or lie about ourselves with greater ease in digitally mediated spaces. Amid digital culture’s blending of reality and fantasy, contemporary fiction has responded with the proliferation of characters that are neither wholly fictional nor factually verifiable, and my dissertation develops the idea of the “somebody” to account for these characters. Catherine Gallagher’s theory of the “nobody” character shows how early fiction developed characters that were meant to refer to no real person beyond the text. Today’s somebody characters challenge these existing theories as they both gesture to a real referent while remaining undeniably fictional, prompting readers to reflect on what is real and what is imagined. I argue that the somebody character might best be understood through the lens of authenticity, which marks what feels honest or genuine, even if it isn’t strictly “true.” How the somebody character might feel authentic, then, becomes more significant to readers who cannot always discern between fact and fiction. I identify the body as a key site where authors can build this sense of authenticity. While digital media often separate us from our own bodies and the bodies of others, contemporary authors recenter embodiment or narrate new kinds of bodily encounters with technology when writing their somebody characters. Each of my chapters focuses on a “somebody”: the author-character, the detective-character, and the actor-character. In my conclusion I additionally speculate on the effects of large-language models and the generation of new bot-characters. The emergence of the somebody character is tied to digital culture, and thus the ways that authenticity has become a method of evaluating each other on the internet also becomes a lens with which to interpret the somebody character. In the genres of autofiction, popular mystery fiction, and amateur fanfiction I address, authors have recourse to addressing the bodies of these characters, building authenticity through the strange attentions paid to embodiment in a seemingly more disembodied digital world. To interpret the somebody, I integrate digital humanities tools with literary critical methods. Close reading highlights how authenticity is built and felt, but when it comes to born-digital writing, computational methods allow for analysis that contends with the vast scale of these works.