Hardware Store Drive

Harvey didn’t particularly need anything from the hardware store, but given that the narrator could only tell him more about the nature of his existence in their stories if he went there, he didn’t have much of a choice. Harvey figured that it must be time to put sheep in the barns for some sort of hardware store in the Bayside area.

After thinking things through in the field for a while, Harvey got into his car and started driving toward the City of Bayside. As he drove, Harvey noticed something quite odd: his intense sense of rivalry and jealousy with the house builders of the Mornington Peninsula was starting to fade. Suddenly, he wasn’t so sure he had ever actually been jealous of them. Why would he have been?

“I’m on my way to the hardware store based in Cheltenham,” Harvey said when he was about halfway there. “Can you tell me more about why you chose to write about my boring life?”

Hoping it wouldn’t startle Harvey to know the truth, the narrator continued to explain what had led them to tell such a story. The truth was that the narrator had been getting quite bored of the job lately and, in an act of sheer desperation, had decided to write some sort of parody of a video game called The Parable of Stanley. In The Parable of Stanley, the narrator gives directions to the titular character, Stanley, and the player has the choice to follow or ignore those directions. It was a brilliant commentary on the nature of video games and free will, and quite frankly the narrator wasn’t sure they were doing it justice with stories about a man named Harvey going to get some timber supplies near Cheltenham.

Harvey, upon realising that his existence could be snuffed out at any second by the narrator simply deciding to move on to another story with a new character, became desperate to please the narrator by keeping the story interesting.