Character Agency and Illusion

Introduction

"No character actually has any agency, because they are constructs — they are narrative constructs, they are narrative tools. There is no agency... The only agency that exists in a book is the author's."

So states Steven Erikson in his Critical Conversations discussion of character agency in Gardens of the Moon — a remark that would seem to close the question before it opens. Yet Erikson immediately complicates his own provocation: "That's not really what people think about when they think about characters with agency. They're thinking about the simulation of agency, the representation of agency that a character might have — the illusion of agency, which is obviously different to agency itself" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). This distinction — between agency as metaphysical fact and agency as readerly experience — is the philosophical engine driving some of the Malazan Book of the Fallen's most complex character arcs. The series does not merely depict characters who gain or lose freedom of action; it interrogates the very concept of agency within narrative, staging a sustained dialogue between authorial determinism, divine manipulation, institutional constraint, and the stubborn human insistence on meaningful choice.

This essay examines Erikson's treatment of agency through four principal case studies — Sorry/Apsalar, Ganoes Paran, Udinaas, and Felisin/Sha'ik — before turning to the structural constraints of military hierarchy and the meta-critical principle Erikson calls "put it back."

The Ontology of Fictional Agency

Erikson's starting position is radically honest about the nature of fiction. The author is the only agent. Characters do not choose; the author chooses for them. What readers experience as "character agency" is, strictly speaking, an aesthetic effect — the felt sense that a character is making meaningful decisions, that their actions proceed from interior motivation rather than plot requirement. This is, as Erikson notes, "an illusion we fool ourselves with when we read... The conceit is precisely what the author is trying to achieve through these characters — otherwise you would not be able to trigger emotional response in the reader" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript).

But this is not a nihilistic dismissal. Erikson argues that agency was not always a discrete critical category. In earlier literary periods, it was subsumed within broader evaluative terms: "We used to talk about well-realized characters, or three-dimensional characters, or well-developed characters. Agency would have been included in that discussion, and not separated out as its own distinct entity" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). The isolation of "agency" as a free-standing concept is a product of the twentieth century's turn toward psychological realism — the demand that characters' actions be motivated by interior states rather than plot necessity. Erikson illustrates this with d'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers: a character who reverses his lifelong loyalties at the drop of a hat because "the narrative event needed him to go that way... it wasn't psychologically real." Modern fiction, by contrast, demands that "the character needs a reason to go back on something that has apparently been a long-held belief — they're not just going to turn their back on it at a whim" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript).

The Malazan Book of the Fallen, written in full awareness of this literary-historical development, both honours the demand for psychological realism and subverts it — by making the removal of agency a central narrative event, and by staging characters' struggles to recover it as the series' primary index of heroism.

Sorry/Apsalar: Possession, Protection, and the Act of Naming

The "obvious exploration of agency is the possession of Sorry," as Erikson himself notes (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). Sorry is the name given to a fisher-girl after the god Cotillion takes possession of her body in Gardens of the Moon. The possession is total: Sorry's consciousness is suppressed, her body becomes Cotillion's instrument, and the name itself — "Sorry" — is not hers but a label applied to what she has become.

Erikson draws a critical distinction between Sorry's possession and other instances in the series: "Sorry is the name that she gets once Cotillion has possessed her, and then she chooses a new name when she gets her body back — she chooses to be Apsalar" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). The act of self-naming is the decisive assertion of agency. To choose one's own name is to claim authorship over one's own identity — to refuse the names imposed by divine will, by circumstance, or by others' perceptions.

But the arc is more nuanced than simple loss-and-recovery. Erikson notes that what preserved Sorry's selfhood during the possession was "the sacrifice of Rigga," which "protected Sorry's soul and mind and consciousness" so that she could "reinhabit the body" after liberation. This distinguishes Sorry from other possession victims in the series — such as Mammot, whose soul is "crushed, destroyed" by the Jaghut Tyrant Raest's possession (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). The preservation of interiority is the precondition for the recovery of agency. Without Rigga's sacrifice, there would be no self left to reclaim the body.

The philosophical implication is that agency is not merely a matter of external freedom (not being controlled) but of interior continuity (having a self capable of choosing). Apsalar's agency in Deadhouse Gates and subsequent novels is meaningful precisely because it emerges from a period of total subjection — because she knows what it is to be a puppet, and chooses, with that knowledge, to be something else.

Ganoes Paran: The Spectrum of Constraint

Ganoes Paran's arc in Gardens of the Moon is Erikson's most sustained exploration of what he calls "the spectrum of decision-making" — the recognition that agency is not binary (free or unfree) but operates along a continuum of constraint.

Paran begins as a noble who rejects his house — an apparent assertion of agency. He joins the military, believing this will make him "his own man." But as Erikson observes: "He was actually far freer as a noble than he was within the military" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). The choice to join the military — seemingly an exercise of free will — places Paran within a rigid hierarchical structure that constrains him far more thoroughly than aristocratic obligation ever did. He is recruited by Adjunct Lorn, who "grooms" him as her replacement: "She selected him to replace her" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). His agency is removed not by violence but by institutional process — by the machinery of imperial administration that converts individuals into instruments.

Then the gods intervene. Oponn — the twin-faced god of chance — manipulates Paran throughout the novel, nudging events through him. When Paran is stabbed, it is not merely a physical wound but a cosmic assertion of divine prerogative: his body is a game-piece on the gods' board. "We have both Crokus and Ganoes Paran being manipulated by gods, and they are moving around, they are doing things, but gods are directly stepping in to manipulate them, to nudge them — and that is denying them agency in those moments" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript).

Paran's climactic assertion of independence comes inside Dragnipur — the sword-realm of Anomander Rake — where he confronts the Hounds of Shadow. As Erikson frames it: "That's his moment of actually cutting himself loose of all of these external forces that are acting upon him" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). The spatial metaphor is precise: Paran enters the ultimate space of confinement (the interior of a sword that imprisons souls) and, within that confinement, performs the act of freedom. Agency, in Erikson's schema, is not the absence of constraint but the capacity to act within constraint — to find, even inside the most oppressive structure, a moment of authentic choice.

The broader lesson concerns military hierarchy itself. Erikson notes that "so many of the characters are part of the military, and you go: how does agency function in a rigid hierarchical structure where they are given orders?" His answer is that agency within military structures operates on "a spectrum — it's not whether they have it or don't have it, but there are all these various levels of agency, almost like a spectrum of decision-making" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). The soldier's supposed "choice" to enlist is itself suspect: "You don't know what was behind that choice, you don't know what the options were — so it may have been no choice at all" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript).

The Adjunct Lorn exemplifies the terminal point of this spectrum. Her arc shows "agency removed by the weight of the Empire — the weight of the Empress's will, the military hierarchy, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few — and all of that crushes her, so she becomes almost dead inside: 'Okay, I'll just be a tool of the Empire'" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). Lorn's deadness is not physical but volitional: she has ceded the capacity for independent action so completely that she has become, in effect, the Empire's puppet — not through supernatural possession but through institutional pressure.

Udinaas: The Reluctant Hero Who Sees the Strings

Udinaas, the Letherii slave who becomes entangled in the cosmic events of Midnight Tides and Reaper's Gale, represents Erikson's most explicitly meta-fictional treatment of agency. He is a character placed in the structural position of the hero — the humble figure drawn into world-shaping events — who recognises what is being done to him narratively and resents it.

Born into debt slavery — "he had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing" (MT) — Udinaas possesses no legal agency whatsoever. His body belongs to his Tiste Edur masters. Yet it is precisely his condition of absolute social powerlessness that gives him a peculiar clarity of vision. Having never possessed the illusion of freedom, he cannot be deceived by its simulation. When cosmic forces — the Wyval blood, the entanglement with Silchas Ruin, the prophetic burden — begin to draw him into the hero's journey, Udinaas does not accept the call with wonder or reluctant nobility. He recognises it for what it is: another form of conscription, another master claiming his labour for purposes that are not his own.

This makes Udinaas a figure of meta-commentary. He occupies the hero's-journey position — the lowly figure elevated by destiny — but refuses to perform the emotional arc that the position conventionally requires. He does not feel grateful for his "elevation." He does not discover hidden strengths that justify his suffering. He sees, with bitter lucidity, that being chosen by the gods is no different in kind from being owned by the Edur: in both cases, his body and his fate are instruments of another's will. The difference is merely one of scale.

Felisin/Sha'ik: The Dissolution of Self

If Apsalar represents the recovery of agency and Udinaas represents its bitter refusal, Felisin Paran represents its annihilation. Felisin's arc across Deadhouse Gates and House of Chains is a sustained study in the progressive destruction of selfhood — through betrayal (by her sister Tavore), through sexual slavery in the Otataral mines, through addiction, and finally through transformation into Sha'ik, the prophesied leader of the Whirlwind rebellion.

The Sha'ik transformation is the series' darkest treatment of possession. Unlike Apsalar, whose interior self was preserved by Rigga's sacrifice, Felisin's identity is consumed — overwritten by the prophetic role that claims her. Brief moments of Felisin's own consciousness surface in House of Chains, flickering through the Sha'ik persona like a drowning person breaking the surface, only to be "snapped back" into the prophetic identity. These moments are devastating precisely because they demonstrate that Felisin is still there — still conscious, still suffering — but unable to sustain her own selfhood against the weight of the role that has been imposed upon her.

The philosophical question Felisin poses is whether agency can be so thoroughly destroyed — by trauma, by systemic abuse, by supernatural transformation — that the distinction between willing agent and puppet becomes meaningless. Felisin does not choose to become Sha'ik in any meaningful sense. She is broken into a shape that fits the prophecy's requirements. Whether this constitutes "possession" in the supernatural sense or merely the logical endpoint of a process of dehumanisation that began with her betrayal and enslavement is left deliberately ambiguous — and the ambiguity is the point. The mechanisms differ; the result is the same.

Point of View as Agency's Architect

Erikson makes a further observation that complicates the question of agency at the level of narrative technique: point of view determines the reader's perception of a character's agency. He illustrates this with Chalice in Gardens of the Moon, a noblewoman seen almost entirely through the eyes of the adolescent Crokus:

"Chalice is viewed very much from another character's perspective — a young, adolescent, idiotic, stupid young boy who projects an entire image and story and narrative onto who Chalice is... From Crokus's point of view, he's the young suitor with the love of his life, and he's sneaking her outside to profess his love. From her point of view, she's just been abducted by a random stranger." (Critical Conversations 08 transcript)

The same event, narrated from different perspectives, yields radically different assessments of who has agency and who does not. Crokus believes he is exercising romantic initiative; Chalice experiences abduction. The reader, confined to Crokus's perspective, may not recognise the disparity — which is precisely Erikson's point. Our sense of a character's agency is always mediated by the lens through which we observe them. "Just how powerful point of view is in terms of shaping the conceptions that the reader will have — it's all down to point of view" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript).

"Put It Back": Agency in Context

Erikson's meta-critical principle — articulated as methodological advice for readers and critics alike — is captured in the phrase "put it back":

"Sometimes you pick one thing and you pick it out, and you're looking at it in all these different ways. But the thing is, we always have to put it back... By all means, break it apart, take it out, look at it from all the different angles — but you still have to put it back in. Put them back, because then you're seeing it in a broader context, and then you begin to see how it interrelates." (Critical Conversations 08 transcript)

Applied to agency, this principle means that no individual character's arc can be fully understood in isolation. Apsalar's recovery of agency is meaningful in relation to Felisin's loss of it. Paran's assertion of independence is meaningful in relation to Lorn's surrender. Udinaas's bitter refusal is meaningful in relation to the conventional hero's-journey acceptance he declines to perform. Agency in the Malazan Book of the Fallen is not a property of individual characters but a relational phenomenon — a quality that emerges from the interaction between characters, institutions, divine powers, and narrative structures, and that can only be assessed by "putting it back" into the total system.

This is also, finally, Erikson's answer to his own opening provocation. Yes, characters have no real agency — they are the author's constructs. But the illusion of agency, convincingly rendered, is not a lesser thing. It is the mechanism by which fiction engages readers' moral and emotional faculties — the means by which ink on a page becomes a felt encounter with the problem of freedom. "If a reader has taken on a character — if a reader has taken those collections of words and the name attributed to them, inside their own narrative landscape, which is what's being recreated when you're reading — you recreate it in your head — then the author has done a good job" (Critical Conversations 08 transcript). The illusion of agency, in other words, is what makes fiction work. And the Malazan Book of the Fallen, by making that illusion visible — by showing its machinery, its fragility, its dependence on perspective — does not destroy it but deepens it.

Conclusion

The Malazan Book of the Fallen treats character agency not as a given but as a problem — a philosophical, narrative, and political problem whose complexity is proportional to the seriousness with which it is examined. By staging arcs that move from possession to self-naming (Apsalar), from manipulation to assertion (Paran), from forced heroism to bitter refusal (Udinaas), and from trauma to dissolution (Felisin), Erikson constructs a taxonomy of agency that encompasses its recovery, its exercise under constraint, its meta-fictional awareness, and its annihilation. The author's frank acknowledgement that all of this is "illusion" — that characters are constructs and the author is the only true agent — does not undermine the project but completes it. For if the highest achievement of fiction is to simulate the experience of freedom so convincingly that readers feel it as their own, then a fiction that interrogates the conditions of that simulation is performing the most honest form of art available: making the reader aware of the strings without breaking the spell.

Sources

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