Why can’t this too be a trope: having had the thought “I’m a writer and can write myself; I can write internal scripts for what I do and how I react,” the character believes he has near-perfect agency over how he feels, thinks, and acts, until one day a particular stress test (in an accelerating series of increasingly rigorous stress tests) suggests that he doesn’t.
It’s not a common trope, certainly, but if it is one, it’s also one that Eliezer is happy to play out. (And there are lots of good tropes that people play out which they shouldn’t avoid just because they are tropes—like falling in love, or being a good friend to others when they are sad, or being a conscientious ethical objector, or being someone who can let go of things while having fun, etc.)
Why can’t this too be a trope: having had the thought “I’m a writer and can write myself; I can write internal scripts for what I do and how I react,” the character believes he has near-perfect agency over how he feels, thinks, and acts, until one day a particular stress test (in an accelerating series of increasingly rigorous stress tests) suggests that he doesn’t.
It’s not a common trope, certainly, but if it is one, it’s also one that Eliezer is happy to play out. (And there are lots of good tropes that people play out which they shouldn’t avoid just because they are tropes—like falling in love, or being a good friend to others when they are sad, or being a conscientious ethical objector, or being someone who can let go of things while having fun, etc.)