The figures in his head—Marty, Felicia, Bri, etc.—are all manifestations of the life he lived, the life he could have lived, the life he should have lived, and so on. They are his multitudes. But Miss Richards also explains that he carries in his head the memories of people who knows, even people he sees in passing. Indeed, after we leave “Act Three,” we see actors from that section reappear as different characters. Ejiofor plays a teacher whose classroom is next to Miss Richards, and whose only interaction with Chuck is a brief congratulations after his performance at the dance. Gillan also appears at the dance, playing a chaperone who says nothing to Chuck. In the background of a street scene, we see Rahul Kohli as a man sitting at a table, drinking coffee and reading his paper.
Again, this might seem like the worst type of egoism. Chuck seems to be turning real people into characters in his own personal story. He may contain multitudes, but those multitudes consist of other people he subordinated into supporting characters in his own imagined main character syndrome. However, another, less oft-quoted set of lines from Song of Myself reveals that’s not what he’s doing. In section Twenty-Four, Whitman declares himself “no stander above men and women or apart from them.” Instead, he states, “Whoever degrades another degrades me, / And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.” Rather than placing himself above other people, he insists upon the opposite:
I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
In other words, Whitman declares that everything he’s claimed for himself, all this about multitudes and excessiveness, can also be claimed for everyone else as well. His Song of Myself is egoist, but it isn’t selfish. It understands that every other person is just as vast and wonderful and worthy of praise as him. Those lines make explicit something implicit in Chuck Krantz’s multitudes. Yes, he’s made everyone who has ever existed into supporting characters in the world in his head. But he too is a supporting character in their stories. He’s part of the multitudes that they, each and every one of them, contains. And each of their deaths will be tiny apocalypse for the versions of him that live inside of their heads.
Many Multitudes
The standout sequence of The Life of Chuck isn’t a bit of poetry. It isn’t even one of Flanagan’s famous monologues, many of which here replicate King’s distinctive prose. It’s a dance sequence in “Act Two: Buskers Forever,” in which the adult Chuck gets inspired by drummer Taylor and dances with a stranger named Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso).
Chuck, Taylor, and Janice have never met one another before and they go their separate ways after the day of dancing. But it’s clear that the interaction, minor as it is, has lived in each of their lives. We see how the dancing connects Chuck to his grandmother and to the life he could have lived, as well as to his grandfather. We can see how the dance informs the multitudes of his inner life in “Act One,” in part because Marty finds comfort during the apocalypse by watching the Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth dance picture Cover Girl, which Charles watched with his grandmother.
