In life, he said, there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Poloniuss point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didnt think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose youre an usher in a wedding. From the grooms viewpoint hes the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bridge and groom both are minor figures. What youve done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isnt a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life. Now, not only are we the heroes of our own life storieswere the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no mans life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, were always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to play. This is generally true. If any man displays almost the same character day in and day out, all day long, its either because he has no imagination, like an actor who can play only one role, or because he has an imagination so comprehensive that he sees each particular situation of his life as an episode in some grand over-all plot, and can so distort the situations that the same type of hero can deal with them all. But this is most unusual. This kind of role-assigning is myth-making, and when its done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of aggrandizing or protecting your egoand its probably done for this purpose all the timeit becomes Mythotherapy. Heres the point: an immobility such as you experienced that time in Penn Station is possible only to a person who for some reason or other has ceased to participate in Mythotherapy. At that time on the bench you were neither a major nor a minor character: you were no character at all. Its because this has happened once that its necessary for me to explain to you something that comes quite naturally to everyone else. Its like teaching a paralytic how to walk again.