Roving Ramblers Make the Best Protagonists

I often talk with other writers about the engines of stories: features of character, plot or even object that allow the narrative happenings to unfold. Sometimes this engine can be literal, as in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” O’Connor’s classic tale features a family on a road trip: An actual vehicle moves the plot along from moment to eventual tragic moment. In other iconic works, the engine is more difficult to pinpoint. By whatever strange magic Haruki Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore guides us through its pages, it is not so simple as the causal churning of gears endemic to most plots. More the hidden engine of dreams, which we are better able to intuit than we can explain.

Of all such engines, the “roving rambler” archetype has fascinated me most over the years: fast-talking, ever-moving characters of modern literature liable to take us on strange, unpredictable rides by way of their fidgety feet and hyperactive minds. Restless and unrestrained, they get themselves into trouble and have to work their way out of it. They are the consummate raconteurs; their stories are powered as much by their madcap interactions