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The Fury by Alex Michaelides

E.M. Forster suggested that you have to choose between plot and character development. Michaelides chooses plot, but he plays with an unreliable narrator's various versions of himself in the plot of this novel The Fury. The narrator is knowing about narration in a way he probably wouldn't be, and is a stand in for the author. 

I've watched Inside Job a few times on Netflix, and there's a section where Reagan Ridley chooses to not leave the shadow government for love, she wipes the mind of someone else who works for a shadow organization and she loves him, but she doesn't join him in the memory wiped future. 

Eliot in The Fury tries to imagine himself into a different future, but he can't pull it off.

I think a lot about Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). It's the movie he writes after he marries his son's sister. He's trying to provide a narrative where someone gets away with things. He recently put out his 50th movie, and there's a suggestion that he was hoping to be more celebrated, but nobody can muster the enthusiasm. 

Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem at an NFL game in 2016, and never worked again in the NFL, after that season. Six years in the NFL is a pretty good career, most players don't get that much. But he became a symbol of something that the winds of fate determined was too provocative. Of course the NFL will rehabilitate murders and felons, so it's possible he was just past his time. But it's also possible he was punished for drawing attention to racism in America. Without his political stance he would have found a job, that is clear and obvious. 

I thought about time travel science fiction and alternative universes. We'd like to see the options the way Reagan Ridley sees them through the magic of science fiction animation. 

Eliot in The Fury is stuck in a realistic narrative, even with an unreliable narrator. 

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