Stranger than Fiction, Answerability, and Co-Authoring a Life

This essay explores how characters’ actions in the film Stranger than Fiction demonstrate the ethics and aesthetics of authoring our own and others’ lives as developed in Mikhail Bakhtin's “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Our lives are open events requiring response and co-authoring from others with different worldviews to achieve consummation of our own becoming. I probe how the film dramatizes our indebtedness to others, our answerability, and the necessity of making choices as ongoing tasks embraced in the face of death. I close with implications for the ethical and aesthetic demands of everyday communication and writing qualitative research.