Summary
Harold rides the bus looking sad. Suddenly, he takes out the manuscript and begins to read it, staying on the bus until he’s finished. Eventually, the bus goes back to the bus depot and Harold is still on it.
Penny comes into Karen’s apartment and finds her lying on the ground. “How many people do you think I’ve killed?” Karen asks, before deciding that she’s killed 8 people. Penny tries to comfort her by telling her that those people were fictional, but Karen seems to feel deep remorse for killing off such nice characters in her books. She processes her own cruelty as an author.
Harold reads the final handwritten pages of Karen’s book, the ones in which he dies, as he rides the bus. He finishes the novel and puts it in a file. We see Karen exiting her apartment in the evening, just as Harold is getting off the bus. He walks up to her and tells her that he read the manuscript and “there’s only one way it can end.” Karen looks at him, confused, as he says, “I love your book, and I think you should finish it.” He hands her the manuscript and walks away.
We see Harold at his office after hours. As Karen narrates the end of her manuscript, Harold finishes his outstanding audits, makes some phone calls, and goes to Ana’s for meatloaf and chocolate pudding. Harold and Ana sit on the couch watching old movies. In bed later, Harold tries to tell Ana how she can deduct the baked goods she gives away from her taxes. The next morning, Harold wakes up, picks up his watch off the bedside table and goes to his old apartment. As he looks at the demolition in his former apartment, his watch alarm begins to go off.
We see a montage of a woman getting ready for work as a bus driver and a little boy waking up and getting on his bike. Harold ties his tie and gets ready for work, as Karen narrates, “Much had changed for Harold over the past few weeks: his attitude towards work, his habitual counting, his love life.” Karen narrates that when Harold reset his watch all those weeks ago at the bus stop, he had reset the watch to 3 minutes later than the time he thought it was and that that changed the course of his destiny.
We see Harold arriving at 8:14 for the 8:17 bus. Ana wakes up and calls for Harold, but he has left. Just as the bus is coming, the young boy on the bicycle skids into the street, and Harold rushes to help him. However, Harold does not get out of the road fast enough and is hit by the bus, falling onto the pavement with a thud. We see Karen finishing the manuscript, lighting a cigarette, and becoming very upset. She has stopped in the middle of a sentence: “Harold Crick was de—“
Karen goes to Jules’ office and gives him the manuscript of the novel. “Have you read it?” she asks, and Jules tells her he has. “I think, perhaps, you may be interested in the new ending,” she says.
We see Harold in a full body cast at the hospital, still alive. “Stepping in front of that bus was pretty brave,” says the doctor, before listing all of the horrible things that happened to Harold. While he should have died almost instantly, the doctor says, he miraculously pulled through because a shard of metal from his watch obstructed the artery from bleeding too much. “You’re very lucky to be alive, Mr. Crick,” says the doctor, and Ana comes in and kisses Harold.
As Jules finishes reading Karen’s revised manuscript, he expresses slight disappointment, telling her, “it’s not the most amazing piece of English literature in several years, but it’s okay.” Karen accepts this and tells him she’ll revise the rest of the book. When Jules wants to know why she changed it, Karen says, “I just realized I couldn’t do it…because it’s a book about a man who doesn’t know he’s about to die and then dies, but if the man does know he’s going to die and dies anyway, dies willingly, knowing he could stop it, then…isn’t that the type of man you want to keep alive?”
Ana feeds Harold a Bavarian sugar cookie at the hospital. Karen narrates, “Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies, and fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or a subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys, and nose plugs, and uneaten Danish, and soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction.” Karen finishes her novel, and Ana draws a wristwatch on Harold’s cast at the hospital.
Analysis
In this section of the film, Karen Eiffel grapples with her own cruelty as a writer. Faced with the flesh and blood reality of one of her characters, Karen considers all the ways that she has been unforgiving to her characters in the past, recounting the schoolteacher she killed off the day before summer vacation, and the man to whom she gave a heart attack in rush hour. After spending her entire career living in the world of fiction, Karen’s run-in with Harold Crick forces her to consider the world of reality, to take seriously her own imaginative leaps. In Stranger than Fiction, the boundary between fiction and reality is breached so that the characters can finally see the ways their fictions have prevented them from engaging with the world around them. For the first time in the film, the pathologically morose Karen seems to confront her own conscience.
While Karen has a change of heart about her investment in fiction, Harold falls in love with fiction when he reads the manuscript on the bus. In fact, the strength of Karen’s prose is enough to convince Harold that he ought to die so that the novel can circulate. “There’s only one way it can end,” he says, referring to his own death. Karen’s talents as a writer prove so immense that Harold loves her book more than he values his own life. The film asks us to consider the artistic impulse as an alternative to life, a way of creating an immortal story out of mortal characters. Stranger than Fiction asks: “is any work of art worth dying for?”
Another, related theme in the film is fate, and how the tiniest changes to time can change the course of a life forever. In this section of the film, we see why Harold’s wristwatch is such an essential part of the novel of his life. As Karen tells us, the usually precise Harold resets his watch to be 3 minutes later than expected, which sets his life on an entirely different course. The film, as an extension of Karen Eiffel’s novel, is concerned with the ways that events can feel predestined, and the ways that tiny events or inconsistencies can reverberate outwards and change the course of a man’s destiny. Harold Crick’s life, as explained by Karen Eiffel’s novel, is a philosophical rumination on the nature of destiny, tragedy, and fate.
In spite of Karen’s inclinations towards the tragic, her meeting with Harold gives her a change of heart about how stories ought to end, and in the final moments of writing her manuscript, she decides to save her hero instead of killing him off. While Karen’s work has been built around the reliability of her tragic endings, she has decided to take a new tack with Death and Taxes, sparing Harold from certain death. Instead, he lives and becomes a hero to his community, a brave man who risked it all to save the life of a little boy. Instead of a tragic story, Harold’s life becomes a heartwarming one.
As Karen sees it, Harold was worth saving precisely because he knew he was going to die and was willing to, in order to save the boy in front of the bus. Harold’s acceptance of his own death, in Karen’s eyes, is an exceptional and admirable quality, and as she explains to Jules why she changed the ending, she says, “Isn’t that the type of man you want to keep alive?” Thus, Harold, for all his averageness and blandness, is positioned in the story as a true hero, proving himself to be anything but average by virtue of his willingness to sacrifice his life for another’s. Harold’s heroism is synonymous with Harold’s sacrifice, and this quality is compelling enough to convince Karen to completely reroute her entire writing project.
