The Story Can Be Made Around the Character
Luigi Mangione: A Character Study in Narrative Failure
In the morning, I wake up early, like I usually do. The cats are a natural alarm clock like a crying baby that never quite grows up. They need fresh food and water. I spoil them, so they are used to something new in the morning. They have trained me and they know it. Around seven in the morning one of them will sit by my pillow and watch me sleep, often tapping on me when will alone fails to garner attention, the other a sentry guarding the door. And I will get up. I always do.
Slippers on my feet, I pad my way down the hall and down the stairs. The cats dance around my feet as if their proximity is what drives me toward their food. The early morning sunlight slips through the windows that look out on the lake. It is the bright, youthful sunlight of the morning that feels so delicate it could break. Puddles of hesitant light on the floor as if uncertain if it is allowed to take up space.
I open the sliding door to the quiet sounds of morning on the lake. Birds and boat engines and the rustle of leaves of thick summer leaves. It distracts the cats long enough so that I can prepare their food. The gentle warmth of a Midwestern summer morning comes with the soft breeze. It exists in the air within the house. Not as warm as it used to be now that we are nearing summer’s end, so there is a slight bite to it as if nature wants to provide a sharp reminder that everything is temporary.
Each year, it feels more and more like a slim knife to the back.
Only once the cats are satisfied, I start making tea — never coffee. My mom never drank it, thought it was repulsive, told me often, so I believed her and followed suit. I have never even tried it and never plan to, which is perhaps reductive or close minded. But it doesn’t bother me, something about the optics of drinking coffee that was somehow tarnished in innocence. That feeling has never quite gone away.
I get some bagels and fruit, it’s all I have. I’ve never cared for breakfast and was not expecting company.
You come down the stairs soon after, eyes still full of sleep, yet I know you didn’t get much rest last night. You would have been thinking about your story as any good writer does. We exchange pleasantries and I ask if you want some breakfast, prefacing with the fact that I don’t have much, and you accept a bagel.
When I sit our toasted bagels and mugs of tea on the table, one of the cats is lounging in the sun, more golden now, in front of the open door. The other stretches nearby. It is time for them to nap again. They’ve exhausted themselves in their efforts to be fed, as if I wouldn’t feed them, as if I ever haven’t.
You pick at your bagel and I remain silent, waiting for you to speak, because eventually you always do. I don’t want to ruin those uninterrupted thoughts in your head with my own perspective. But there is a heaviness to your shoulders from that unrestful night, wrestling with a truth you didn’t want to acknowledge. Speaking it will bring it into being and you will betray yourself, even though your silence already has more than you know.
“I want it to be him.”
“Why?”
You glare at your breakfast as if it is at fault and don’t say a word.
So I continue gently, “Why do you need it to be him? Because it’s cleaner?”
“It has to be him,” you whisper, a muscle pops in your jaw as you continue to frown at your bagel like it’s a personal offense.
It is not really an answer to my question, but that’s okay.
“So let’s make it him,” I say.
This makes you look up at me, lips parted slightly. “What? I thought you said he doesn’t work.”
“He doesn’t work for the story,” I confirm. “But you want it to be him, so let’s make it him.”
The words sound odd coming out of my mouth, but you sit up a little straighter when I do as if I have offered you a solution.
“I can change his motivation.”
I pick at the pomegranate in front of me, the bright red juice getting everywhere, sticky and staining. I wipe my fingers with a napkin that now looks like it’s been marked with blood. It bothers me more than it should.
“No,” I say decidedly. “We’re going to make it him as the character is right now. We’ll work backwards. Create a story from the desired end.”
You look at me disbelieving. It contradicts everything I said last night. When I told you I didn’t think your character, your suspect, worked in your story. But you wait before protesting, even though I can see the objection growing in your eyes. You will listen to what I have to say, in the meantime, you begin to eat in earnest.
So I begin as well.
The first thing you have to acknowledge is that the suspect is the main character in your story, the story you told me yesterday in its current form. But because his psychology doesn’t work for the crime, if you want it to be him, then this story cannot be told from his perspective. You need to clarify your protagonist. The hero to your suspect’s villain. That categorically opposing perspective will suppose distance from the suspect enough that the failures of his character might be ignorable.
You nod. “There are a lot of different perspectives that could frame the narrative. It would mean something different in all of them.”
But it almost sounds like a question when you say it, even though you know you’re right.
“The distinction is important for your story,” I say.
If your story is told from the perspective of the victim, you make yourself vulnerable to the potential of other suspects because your suspect doesn’t neatly fit the narrative. Too much from the victim and it will bear more questions than answers. The victim needs to be as distant from the story as possible. You need to use a perspective that is biased, perhaps slightly unreliable due to this bias, so that the narrative — your desired narrative — becomes unquestionable, especially to this character.
“Someone with power and influence, while still intimately connected to the case. Their authority will inform audiences,” I say. “Uh, journalists, prosecutors, experts, politicians, law enforcement. Someone the public will believe because they’ve been told they should.”
And I look away when I say this as if that itself is a crime.
“Even if this person believes this, it doesn’t change the problems with the character,” you remind me, unnoticing. “Intuitive readers will see through it.”
“Tell me where the issues are.”
You give me a long look because I know where the issues are. It was me who pointed them out, but you indulge me as you do. One glaring issue is his politics. He is a self-proclaimed centrist, which negates the very necessary extremism required for a political murder. And this murder would be a political act because of his wealthy background. He would never have had issue with health insurance, so it wouldn’t be personal grievance.
“I can change his socioeconomic class,” you suggest.
But I dismiss the idea. We are trying to make him work as he currently is. It is what we do. It is the craft.
You don’t say anything for a moment, looking at my kitchen table where a chunk of wood has been taken out. I cannot even remember how it happened. Once, I colored it in with a brown marker so it looked less obvious, but that has long since rubbed off.
And you pick at the dent unknowingly. You ask quietly, “Is that really how it works? We reshape him until he fits.”
That feels performative, untrue, and something in me hates it.
“No, we’re not changing him or reshaping him,” I say definitively. “We, writers, reveal as it is necessary.”
“You mean in terms of story logic?”
“Exactly.” And I take some more arils, the fleshy outgrowth of the pomegranate, the fruit itself, fingers wet and red as I pull them from the bitter, white membrane. A couple of arils slip through my fingers and one rolls off the table. I don’t think my napkin can get any more stained, but it does. “You’re thinking about him as if he is a real person. I’m thinking about the narrative. He only exists because of the narrative.”
The six-month dark period, I muse, is where your plot hole can be remedied, specifically in relation to his psychology not matching that required for this sort of crime. Ideologues often chronicle their descent, especially to an audience via social media. They want to be heard. This absence, the six-month quiet on all his social media accounts, is odd. It doesn’t specifically suggest anything nefarious, but perhaps, if radicalism exists, it would be in that space.
In the face of a void, especially in a story, audiences will trust the narrator’s account of what will fill that void. Your trusted narrator says that he was radicalized and did not document it, even if improbable, psychologically inconsistent, people will believe it. Don’t allow the opportunity for this to be examined closely as then it will fall apart.
“That’s it?” you ask, letting out a soft breath, not quite a laugh.
I shrug and finish the last few bites of my bagel before responding, but I find it hard to swallow. Something about your question leaves a bad aftertaste that strengthens in the silence.
So I say, “So long as someone else is in control of his story, the narrative can be manipulated as you wish. The psychology of the suspect, despite illogical, can be overlooked in the face of the voice of authority.”
The empathy of his character can be reframed as radicalism — as you had originally suggested and I dismissed. The protagonist calling it so will make it true. He is highly educated and intellectual, traits that can be weaponized, with the right words can be made threatening. Genius as the catalyst for apathy. Intellect not as something to be revered but feared. The very condition of possessing knowledge that most people do not becomes an indicator of guilt, simply because it is unknown, and it is punished. Competence as culpability. That is how you make an Ivy League engineer a believable suspect.
You don’t say anything, sipping your tea thoughtfully. A space just beyond my head is where your eyes are, unfocused, but I know you’re thinking, turning this over in your head. I am as well.
“He doesn’t contact friends or family in this time period, which you probably assumed. His mom files a missing persons report in November,” you add, but it feels open ended, as if the detail waits for my approval.
I say that is certainly enough to make him suspicious, which, from your slight nod, is what you wanted me to say. Society does not take well to divergence from the norm like cutting off one’s family, disappearing for a few months, even as an adult, even if not inherently malicious, even if not illegal. The fact that it is not acceptable is what makes it suspicious.
You agree and mention you contemplated his use of a fake ID, which I acknowledge will increase the assumption of guilt. There is a certain implication with ideas such as a disappearance, missing persons report, and fake ID that supposes something nefarious. Not that it always is, but you can use that undertone and the preconceived notions that come with it to your advantage.
“Your suspect,” I say. “Is traveling around with a fake ID, a crime itself, and has cut contact with friends and family.”
Then he shows up four to six months later in New York City shooting a man in the back. Most people might not even need elaboration. Any divergence from the what is considered acceptable or normal will reinforce his guilt, regardless of psychology. This context will confirm his role as the suspect without cross examination.
You nod. “He starts thinking about it in August. Maybe decides to actually go through with it in October.”
I remind you that these particular events — like a health insurance company’s investor conference — and their details are not entirely public. It’s common knowledge this event will take place in New York City, as it does every year, but it is not announced until about a week before it actually happens. Even then, the specific location and venue are not included in this announcement.
“Is that a problem?” you ask.
I think for a moment. “Not necessarily. I’m sure with the right words, the right implications from the right people, you can suppose that it is possible for your suspect to have discovered this information through his own efforts. Everything is discoverable if you want it enough.”
You said he was a computer engineer. Perhaps that allowed him the skillset and opportunity to discover this information. Again, the use of his intelligence as explanation for what cannot be cleanly explained can do wonders. He has capabilities most people do not. Even if getting this information seems improbable, it can still be plausible by his standards and your audience’s ignorance.
“So he goes to New York ten days before the shooting,” you muse. “It gives him time to practice the route and his escape. And he stays in a hostel.”
You say because he needs to be able to use a fake ID to check in.
I smile. “You’ve never stayed in a hostel, have you?”
You have, but only abroad. A great deal of hostels, especially in New York City, require a valid government ID and a credit or debit card on file. Obviously, things change situationally, depending on who is at the front desk, but policy in these places in the United States supposes a fake ID would not get one a place to stay with certainty.
This worries you. You have a plan for a manhunt, but if his name is connected to the surveillance footage from the hostel, then that mystery is obviated. The use of his real name at the hostel feels anticlimactic. It feels unexciting. In truth, it doesn’t do the narrative any favors if they can look at surveillance footage, discover who checked in at that time, then have his name. Part of the mystery is the nameless, faceless shooter on the run for five days.
“You may not need to worry,” I say.
“Why not?”
People don’t look closely. They may not even know certain policies exist. Someone tells them that something is then it is, often without question. By nature, resistance requires effort and effort is not something people willingly give. You say he used a fake ID, then he used a fake ID. People prefer clean stories.
“It doesn’t necessarily speak to criminal intent,” I remind you. “He could have simply wanted to get away from his life, but if you frame it correctly, it can be molded into whatever intent you want to imply.”
You lapse back into silence, finally eating your cold bagel, but you don’t seem to notice. There is a bird on the edge of the deck that has woken both the cats from their nap. It is as if it taunts them with its freedom, knowing somehow my cats are trapped behind this screen door, unable to get to it. And I feel guilty at the injustices. Their lives are decided by me without my knowing what they really want. It is objectively safer for them inside than out, but I can’t tell them that. I can’t explain it to them and so they will never know.
Perhaps they resent me. I think I would. Their lives are not their own to make. And I cannot help myself, I never have, I wonder if your character would resent me for rewriting his story. Something rises unwelcome in my throat and I swallow hard.
“How does he do it?” I ask, looking away from where the cats sit together like one organism in their careful stillness, as if they would ever have the opportunity to catch the bird.
For a moment, you don’t respond, lost in your own thoughts, then your eyes focus on me. “What?”
I clear my throat, still thick. “How does he kill him?
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“He shoots him in the back,” you say. Simple, effective.
Three shots are fired, you explain. The first in his leg, incapacitating, the next two you have yet to figure out the order of. One will miss the victim, probably the second while he’s panicking and injured, but the other will hit him in the back, go through his liver, through his heart, then out of the left side of his chest. Alternatively, perhaps the bullet will through the heart first then the liver and out the left side of his back. You haven’t yet decided. Depends on how the victim falls after the incapacitating shot.
“Surgical,” I muse.
This startles you.
“He’s not…” You look into your mug as if the answer lies within it. “He’s not an expert, a professional, what have you.”
“No, I would imagine not,” I agree, thinking of him. He is less of an outline now.
The east coast, Ivy League background does not speak to familiarity with firearms. In fact, it speaks to the opposite. This man most likely has never touched a gun in his life. But those six-months, that dark period, I remind you that your protagonist can suggest anything happened in that time and audiences will believe it. And the comment unexpectedly feels a bit like a betrayal.
Six months seems a bit quick to become skilled enough to hit small a moving target, someone’s leg, and surgically execute someone piercing two vital organs with a single bullet, but if your protagonist believes it then audiences will believe it. They won’t look too closely depending on the source of the information.
“The gun jams a few times,” you offer, as if that is helpful.
“A Glock?” I ask.
“No,” you reply, sitting forward. “A Station SIX with a silencer.”
I frown.
You explain this is a similar to a World War II era pistol or a veterinary gun. You like it because of the silencer. It’s thin and it’s sleek. It looks like an assassin’s gun.
It is here I have to interject, returning to the simple logic of a narrator, because this is not a common kind of gun. A twenty-something engineer who knows nothing of firearms, would almost certainly not choose this as his weapon. He would probably not know of its existence. And, as you said, this is an assassin’s gun. Your suspect is not an assassin. He is a young man gone rogue and this detail is crucial.
He is a young ideologue giving up himself for a cause. But this particular identifier will gain him sympathy. So you must shift the narrative to weaponized activism taken too far that now needs to be swiftly punished. Not an assassin, no unique pistol, nothing unique. Just a young man with access to everyday weapons who caused chaos. Suffocate the activism, focus on the violence.
You’re disappointed. You like this gun, but the gun itself implies a level of professionalism that your suspect simply would not have. This particular gun jamming a few times, as you suggest, would be unlikely.
But you can still use this gun.
You sigh as I’ve just explained to you why you cannot use the gun. But you ask, “Why?”
“It will speak to narrative framing,” I reply, sitting forward, ever the writer constructing a narrative, my previous hesitations abandoned with the act of the craft itself. “You don’t change the suspect to fit the evidence. You change the evidence to fit the suspect.”
If you begin your story with the belief that your suspect used a Station SIX pistol, you lay the groundwork for a particular narrative: a professional assassin. But after he is arrested, they find another gun, something simple. And the narrative changes accordingly as if the Station SIX had never been a part of the conversation. The way the murder is framed necessarily shifts with the changing of the weapon. It is symbolic of the power of details and their design because the suppositions made based on the Station SIX can no longer exist with this other, more mundane, firearm.
In its place, I suggest a 3D printed Glock style gun. Designs are available online. Your suspect is a computer engineer, it would not be improbable that he would know how to operate a 3D printer. Perhaps only part of the gun is made with a printer, the other parts are standard. A homemade silencer as well. These particular guns are likely to jam, even if your suspect was a professional by the very nature of its structural unreliability. Conveniently, if ballistics don’t match, the homemade weapon can be blamed as they tend to be inconsistent when they fire.
“Why would they not match?”
“Just in case,” I say.
You don’t ask me in what situation that might matter, but you can probably imagine. And your silence speaks louder than anything you might say. I wonder what this costs you, what version of your story you are discarding to make this work.
Instead, you say, “It feels dangerous.”
I nod. “And it should if you want to make him into a threat.”
“And how do you know all of this?”
“It’s for another project.” I smile.
You laugh quietly and shake your head. “Don’t commit any crimes. They’ll charge you by virtue of your search history.”
“Oh, I’m aware.” Then I nod to your mug of tea. “Do you need more hot water?”
You nod and I take our mugs to the kettle on the stove and refill them. I can feel the steam on my hand as I pour the water, sharp and insistent. It is a wonder we drink it. While I am occupied, you bring our dirty plates over to the sink, even though I tell you that you don’t need to.
Then we head back to the table. The bird is gone and the cats are resting again.
You decide to have him arrested with damning evidence on him. The gun, the silencer, loaded magazines, and a journal with writings related to the healthcare industry. Even if his psychology makes him questionable as the suspect, the very fact of him having evidence on him will dispel any doubt. Admittedly, it is a good strategy. Once it is in the affidavit, it becomes history. It no longer matters how implausible it is, the story has already been set.
“In Pennsylvania,” I suggest, “people on the run are always caught in Pennsylvania.”
“That’s…” You think for a moment. “Actually true. Why is that?”
I shake my head and take a sip of tea. “I have no idea. Something about Pennsylvania.”
Then I ask you about theories, but you’ve gone silent again. You watch the cats in the sunlight, still struggling, still undecided. I can see it on your face, your lips twisted to the side and your brow furrowed.
“It still doesn’t work,” you say.
And you’re unsatisfied.
“That’s what we’re doing though, isn’t it? It doesn’t work, but we’re making it work.” You don’t look at me, so I sit forward, hands around my warm cup. “You said he has a journal. It’s a manifesto. A confession.”
“I wasn’t going to push it that far.”
“That’s how you make it work,” I say, but saying it almost makes me breathless. I don’t know if it’s fear or excitement. “You use language to prime you audience to believe what you need them to believe. He doesn’t work. This doesn’t work. We’ve already established that, so then we contort it so that it does.”
“That feels disingenuous.”
“Stories are lies,” I reply, to which you flinch almost imperceptibly. “This can still be the story. He can still be the suspect.”
You drop your hands to the surface of the table with a thud and the cats startle from their sleep, but upon noticing it is you and things are safe, they curl back up to sleep. You think for a moment, looking at, but not seeing, a place on the wall.
“It’s illogical,” you say.
I don’t say anything for a moment and trace the edge of my mug. A soft hum from the motion follows. Sound and air and physics. Something I am not smart enough to know. There is something lonely in that. True in a way these words we speak could never be.
“Then that’s the story.”
You look up. “What?”
And so I explain.
It is not fact, not truth, and I’m not arrogant enough to claim that it is. This is my opinion, but I tell you anyway. Because it is my truth, because I have searched my entire life, trying to understand, but it is always just out of reach. And so I write. That is why I write.
We depend on stories as a way of understanding the world in which we live. Regardless of one’s identity, culture, upbringing, the singular through line for each of us is stories. From the way we communicate something that has happened to us to the way the news reports things going on around the world. It is storytelling. Comprehension exists only as a result of the idea of a story arc. A beginning, a middle, and an end.
It is not just narrative structure in its simplest form, but the way existence makes sense. If there is a definitive arc, then meaning can be parsed from the various beats a story hits. We find patterns and in patterns are themes, which then allows us to create meaning. To pretend that any of this amounts to something.
But narratives are made, they are told, and so they do not exist objectively or truthfully. It is categorically impossible. Bias and perspective exist in their nature, by being told at all, and that assumes a truth not quite absolute, even in news stories and history textbooks. That alone makes stories powerful because in their execution they feel true, they are told as if they are. There is an honesty in storytelling, but it is a falsified honesty. Perspective that is blatantly obvious can be ignored and the careful structure built by the story’s author made invisible. Both can be true at the same time. That is what makes for a good story.
This, your story, is not just a story, but a story within a story. You want it to be him, so to make it him you have to tell the story of someone telling a story about your suspect. We’ve decided that he doesn’t work, but the narrative needs it to be him, guilty or innocent, it does not matter.
You are the author and so you will prepare your audience accordingly, prime them for whatever you want them to get out of it, but you are also cataloging someone else doing the very same thing. The perspective that you decide to write this story from, whose eyes from which your audience will see the suspect, matters. And that is the real story. Perhaps not easily obvious, but the people who do see that it doesn’t work, that your suspect doesn’t work, will see your narrative for what it is.
Storytellers can be carefully selective. It is a form of manipulation. Lie by omission — or perhaps a blatant fallacy. Stories are told for effect, for a response, to get someone to think in a certain way. Stories are weapons in the right hands.
“You’re not telling a story of a murder,” I say, “you’re telling a story about storytelling and the threat that it poses.” And I hesitate, unbidden, as if something inside of me doesn’t want to say it. But I do anyway. “Because narratives can be manufactured, especially and most often by people with power. The truth is that the murder only matters because it gives us a story to tell.”
Audiences listen to the stories they are told and they won’t look closely because to do so would be to admit to the lie. Not just of the systems that tell us stories, but the very fact that reality cannot fit into a narrative structure. There is a quiet desperation with which we force a beginning and middle and end to situations. As if that is all of it, existing in isolation like a novel on your bookshelf, and with that conclusion meaning can be found. But that isn’t truth. The truth exists in the uncomfortable, terrifying fact that there is no end. Sometimes there is simply no meaning to be found.
But in reality, not truth, all people need is a character, an archetype, something easily understood to fit into what they were taught to believe, what they were told was right. If it fits, if it is neat, they will not question it. If the story is supported emotionally, but not factually, it will still stand. It does not matter if context of the narrative, the characters, the psychology, or the ideology is improbable, so long as it is plausible, so long as it is told with confidence, so long as the person who tells it is believable, it will be believed.
And I’m shaking just a bit when I finish talking. I don’t know why. You don’t say anything for a while. I don’t know if I’m afraid of what this means or if I am thrilled at the sheer power of words. Perhaps it is both, more the former than the latter, but I would be lying to myself if I said I was simply afraid. I’ve always been drawn to what cannot quite be defined.
“I don’t think you give people enough credit,” you say quietly.
I almost smile, something jaded and unkind. “I give them a lot. The ability to do this, to pretend and manipulate everything, is a learned skill. And, God, it’s impressive.”
All to make ourselves feel more comfortable, quelling the fears that no one will ever be quite brave enough to speak aloud.
“Your story is not disingenuous,” I say.
The falsity is what makes it true. The illogical nature of your suspect being the suspect is the entire point. You do not need to worry. If someone notices the disconnect, then they are probably those who will see the larger story you are telling — a narrative about the power of telling stories and how they inform everything in our reality. True or untrue, right or wrong, they exist to frame the way each one of us sees the world. Some a shield and some a sword, each of us wielding them in our own way.
“Your narrative works because people want something that feels good, feels rights, feels clean. And the system gives it to them,” I finish quietly. Then, almost inaudible, “We all do, I suppose.”
“It’s still not him,” you say, not quite disappointed, but something else. Something fragile, unknowable, as if you’ve just been told something you shouldn’t know. “Not really.”
“No, it’s not,” I agree, our tea now cold. There is a line around my mug where the tea sat for too long while I was talking. Then my throat tightens again and I swallow whatever rises inside of me to say, “But in your story they make it him anyway.”
You start to pick at the dent in my table again, peeling off the rest of the brown marker. Not that it matters. The truth had already been revealed once it started rubbing off.
“I’m sorry.” You pull your hand back, finally realizing what you’ve unconsciously been doing.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll just go over it again.”
Some of the marker is under your nails now. You look at it for a long time before offering, “It’s just a story.”
And we both know that’s not true.
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