Warning: This article contains considerable spoilers for The Last of Us (the videogames, possibly the forthcoming TV show too, if it follows the same plotline) and the George Saunders story ‘Victory Lap’ from Tenth of December. If you haven’t played or read these titles, you are strongly urged to do so. Then read this.

In part one I looked at what complications emerge when an author like Lisa McInerney writes a narrative in which the viewpoint switches regularly around a large cast of characters, especially when those characters are in direct conflict. By moving the viewpoint, what McInereny often does is shift certain character from what first appears to be the protagonist to the antagonist, and vice versa, depending on whose vantage point we are seeing the action from. Because we’re to some extent conditioned to expect to identify with the protagonist and be against the antagonist, and to know who is which and for those roles to stay constant, this technique causes a complication in that identifying – for a short time at least, but with lasting repercussions.

And what this creates for the reader is, initially, a discomfort at being asked to understand a character we were previously happy to label ‘bad.’ Whose story is this, and who should we get behind? It’s taking our empathetic potential and confusing it, trying to make us see how someone might perform ‘bad’ actions for reasons that we can not only understand but might, if pushed, agree with, despite our relectuance to do so.

These are the stories that I think have the potential to stay with us the longest, precisely because they complicate the application of empathy, and by doing so have a greater ring of truth about them. Life is a complex web of overlapping agendas, and when we’re in it, in the moment, if we’re honest with ourselves we’re not always sure what direction we’re supposed to be going in.

I thought about this while playing The Last of Us games. On one level, you’ve been here before: you/the controllable character versus the nameless monstrous hordes. There’s not a lot of nuance in terms of whose side you’re on: it’s that character you’re in control of. But at the climax of part one, he, Joel, does something that you are forced to question. After escorting immunity carrying teenager Ellie across the US, Joel then halts the surgery that will extract a cure for the virus but kill Ellie in the process. It’s her life to save the human race, and Joel makes the decision (without Ellie’s consent) to save Ellie. It’s not ethics that forces Joel’s hand but the bond that’s developed between them, connected to his unexamined grief at losing his teenage daughter at the virus’ outbreak. But by doing so he denies a potential cure. He literally chooses to save himself over the entire human race, and robs Ellie of her volition: she is unconscious and prepped for surgery when Joel makes his rescue, and knows nothing about it until later.

So a difficulty is introduced here. What game have you been playing for the last many hours? The main character has been gruff, stern, emotionally unobtainable, but also vulnerable, honest and heroic when called upon. And now he’s also a mass murderer? You can see where the decision came from, so it’s not exactly difficult to understand, but you have to weigh that against the meaning of the action. Luckily, it’s the end, so you’re not forced to continue your empathetic struggle with someone you now feel conflicted about. But the sense of victory, of completion, is tainted.

And all this has repercussions that drive part two. Joel denied Ellie a choice and humanity a future, but more directly he killed people in order to free Ellie. Abby, the daughter of the surgeon who tried to stop Joel, comes for revenge, an action which sparks Ellie’s own journey of vengeance to find Abby. So you start off playing as both Ellie and Abby through a few short, establishing scenes, but once Joel dies (an act you are not forced to perpetrate, only watch from Ellie’s helpless perspective) you stay as Ellie for a good bit of time – long enough to almost forget you had played as Abby. When the perspective flips back to Abby halfway through, and back a few days in narrative, it’s disconcerting. Powered through empathy for Ellie’s mission, you’re now forced as Abby to look back at the person coming for you, but you also learn about Abby’s life and background, about her military life but also her complicated lovelife and her friends – characters who, as Ellie, you have recently killed – as well as her relationship with her father, than man Joel killed to save Ellie.

So here we are again, flipping between protagonist and antagonist, gradually becoming less and less sure of who is supposed to be who. This culminates in a confrontation on a beach, where the two main characters, exhausted, staggering, fight to the death with knives and fists, and you’re back playing as Ellie, being asked to press buttons that by this point you really don’t want to press.

It’s almost impossibly harrowing, but that’s what passes for entertainment these days. And I’d argue that the reason you’re still here, waving a knife around on a misty beach, is the emotional component of the story. Ellie’s mission now feels like grim completion, the enaction of the bleaker aspects of human nature. And although you’re pushing for this conclusion, you desperately don’t want Abby to die, a character who’s gone from unlovable aggressor to fully rounded character, equal in the story to Ellie.

The fact that you’re essentially controlling the actions of both characters adds an extra level. John Higgs makes an interesting point about videogame characters in Love and Let Die:

A videogame character has to be distinct and memorable, and can have a complex history, but never to the extent that their motivation and goals differ from those of the player who inhabits them. The fun comes from imagining ourselves to be that character, as they act in the same way we would. When that character’s actions are motivated by an implausible personal history that we are unable to identify with, the audience loses its ability to project themselves onto that hero. We can no longer live vicariously through their actions. Instead, we sit back and passively observe them.

Perhaps here The Last of Us operates at the limits of this idea. Given the violence perpetrated by each character, we might find ourselves pulling away from identifying with them, but because their motivations are so compelling and real, we cannot help but to do so. And in that we find a conflict in ourselves, perhaps disturbed by what we find in there, what we identify with and perhaps haven’t previously noticed about ourselves. And by the end of the game, in the final confrontation on the beach, we’re urging Ellie to think twice, even as we push the buttons that make her act. It goes without saying that her act of mercy at the very mast moment comes as a relief. So while whether it’s still ‘fun’ to control these characters is debateable, there’s probably still enough identification available to stop the experience from becoming passive.

And of course Ellie learnt something important from Joel before he died, at least in retrospect, about forgiveness. I like how the narrative pulls back from being too clear on this point. It’s as if Ellie herself is unsure what it means, only that her conscience is at this point screaming at her to stop. It’s something like: if life means anything, it has to rise above the endless cycle of death and violence. The same is true of Abby in her storyline. The sense is that, though they form discrete narratives, each part of the series is an act in a larger story, to be concluded in whatever comes next. Ellie and Abby, each one mirroring the other, go through their darkness and emerge with something small and hopeful they can use to build something new from. Forgiveness, mercy, kindness. Whatever saves humanity you sense will come from this journey, the harder, more extracting one than that represented by a simple medical cure, and one forged by empathy. My feeling is that part three will work on that basis. If Ellie wanted to forgive the man who killed the world and put it on her shoulders, can she work towards forgiving the woman who killed Joel? Because something has to break the miserable cycle at some point if there’s to be any point in carrying on.

So we empathise with two different but equally difficult characters, as their stories grow more complex and their motivations muddier. What’s the result of this? George Saunders says something about fiction as being an exercise in finding empathy when discussing Chekhov’s ‘In The Cart’ and ‘The Darling’ in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

This story invites us to judge Olenka … We come to know her, even as we see her in her flaws … The more I know about her, the less inclined I feel to pass too harsh or premature a judgement. Some essential mercy has been switched on … the story could encourage us to think more kindly of people in life.

He suggests that fictional empathy might encourage us to feel the same way about people in real life that we might otherwise overlook, or misunderstand, because we see in the story something extracted from life that we can refer back to, with the added insight a story can provide. With The Last of Us, the forced empathy of actually interacting with a character encourages us to do the same for people we might have a decent reason for disliking. Perhaps we’re to some extent conditioned to believe that someone’s actions, designated as malign, can only be the result of an off-brand character. It means we don’t have to subject ourselves to exhausting consideration, and reach a suitable conclusion. There’s something soothing in that, a ‘lush release of pressure that always resulted when he submitted to a directive,’ like Saunders says of Kyle in his story ‘Victory Lap’ (which I’ll come to in a second). But in actual fact, does anybody do anything for simple Iago-level motivations of pure evil? Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy in the situation. They’re acting from the belief that their actions are justified, as Joel and Ellie do. But Ellie and Joel, from Abby’s perspective, are surely themselves in that category of straightforward evildoer, at least for the majority of the game. Her own experiences of saving and caring for a ‘Scar’ – the Seraphim cult who act as a separate antagonist for her in the game – force her to see the world from another perspective, which has the effect of complicating her understanding and bringing something more humane and forgiving to the surface. The Last of Us shows how achieving this empathy can sometimes be a difficult journey, for both the reader (or player) and the character. We’re all struggling, so does this double the empathy?

Saunders’ own ‘Victory Lap’ does something similar, and in its own way as equally harrowing, by switching the viewpoint between a teenage girl who is abducted, a teenage boy who witnesses it, and the man who is doing it. Here we rapidly switch viewpoints around the event, observing it from different characters, and therefore different psyches with different understandings of the world. Perhaps most shocking is the internal monologue of the unnamed abductor:

Melvin appeared in his mind. On Melvin’s face was the look of hot disappointment that always preceded an ass whooping, which had always preceded the other thing. Put up your hands, Melvin said, defend yourself.

And later, after Kyle has intervened to stop him:

Figures you’d blow the simplest thing, Melvin said.

Melvin, God, can’t you see my head is bleeding so bad?

A kid did this to you. You’re a joke. You got fucked by a kid.

Melvin seems to live in the abductor’s mind, an internal monologue personified as some external antagonist (I assume an older brother) which he uses to berate himself. It goes without saying that this is not quite enough to empathise, exactly. That would be a stretch. But something in that direction opens up, just a crack, just enough to see the human inside, and that they, like us, are motivated by something we recognise. Shame? Stress? They’re all things we know well. And yes, something’s gone wrong with this one, and how those ambiguous motivations manifest into action, but whether you like it or not you feel like you understand him a little bit more than you’d like to, because in this he is not too different to the reader.

There’s something radical at work here. The story suggests that it’s not even the motives of the antagonist we should be paying attention to, but something barely perceivable in their psyche that gives way to these motives, something they themselves are barely aware of, or at least ill-equipped to interrogate. They’re fallible, just like us; not a super-organised criminal mastermind, just another messy, complicated, damaged idiot, like the rest of us. Maybe if our lives had taken a few different turns, horrifyingly the same.

So where does this leave us? In a grey area, inevitably. There’s freedom in being decisive, in seeing the hard line between right and wrong, but is it just and fair always? ‘We mistake the world made with our own thoughts for the real world. A delusional gulf is created,’ says Saunders in A Swim in a Pond. Stories like The Last of Us and McInerney’s books drag this delusion into the light, showing us complex characters, capable of evil and good in equal measure, harassed by their subconscious and jittery, uncertain grasp on reality, and asking us if we see ourselves in them, and the world at large. The hope is that we do, if just for a moment, even if it is difficult to accept, and understand how partial and untrustworthy our own perception might be. And with that, perhaps in our own lives we will think a little harder about ourselves and what we do.