A Passive Protagonist?

I've just gone back to editing story two in a series.

It's quite a dark place in which the narrator is going mad.

Think space Alzheimer's paranoia, whole nine yards.

The problem is after rereading it several times, I was bugged by something I didn't quite get.

It was the crew that saved him in the end.

So my emcee has an ex machina solution, quote unquote.

Now, when I saw this, I immediately jumped to literature.

I immediately thought of Candide by Voltaire, which I've, I've mentioned more than once on this podcast.

Um, yep.

Thanks for catching up.

What is Terry writing now? You don't want to know.

Um, if you haven't read Candide, it's basically a, a satire about Victorian, not Victorian, um, The Age of Enlightenment's Ridiculous Optimism.

And one philosopher in particular, Leibniz? Leibniz? I can't remember his name.

Voltaire.

No, no, no. Voltaire was making fun of that guy's optimism philosophy is what I'm saying.

So anyway, it's a very fantastic book.

Not very long.

And it's absolutely hilarious.

It's just so sick and wrong.

It's wonderful.

But...

Candide really doesn't do anything in the book.

It's everybody else that does stuff in the book.

He just kind of bounces along, you know, going through life and decides that being curious in the end is a bad thing.

Decides that all these other things are bad and that really he just wants a simple life where he doesn't do anything.