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“Stepping into his boss’s office—” The familiar refrain is cut off as Stanley ducks backwards out the door and it slams in his face. He can still hear the voice faintly through the wood, still finishing the scripted lines. Sometimes he liked to sit here and wait for the Narrator to notice he was missing, just because it was funny to hear him panic. Not this time, though. He grips the bucket with both arms, takes a deep breath, and heads back downstairs.
The first time Stanley had ever gone into this ending had been one of the worst moments of his life. For a few brief minutes, he thought he had finally found an exit. He had left the voice behind, and there were signs saying that escape was only a few stairs away. And then he got into the pod, and… found himself back in his office, back at the beginning of the story, like always. His rage and despair were so overwhelming, he didn’t leave the room for weeks after. As time went on, however, Stanley found that this route did offer a small form of escape, of comfort. He came here when he needed to be alone with his thoughts, whenever he couldn’t stand listening to the Narrator for even one more minute. He stayed here for as long as it took to process his emotions, and then, when the silence stopped feeling like a blessing and started feeling more like a crushing emptiness, he got back in the pod and reset.
Now, though, he can feel a spark of hope that he has not felt in a very long time. It feels like the old days again, before he accepted that this was his forever. The game is refreshed, the possibilities seem endless once again. All because of a simple bucket. The bucket has so far changed every single path he can walk, and on this path, Stanley reckons there’s only one thing that can change. Maybe this time, he thinks, we can both be free.
“We’re getting out of here,” he whispers to the bucket. “Don’t you worry.” The bucket is completely silent in his arms, which surprises him. Is it not as excited as he is? Well, it hasn’t been trapped here nearly as long, he reflects. Maybe it still hasn’t realized how significant of a chance this is. Or maybe… “You don’t believe it, do you? You think we’ll just reset again. I know, I don’t have any proof this will work. But don’t you even want to give it a chance?”
Again the bucket says nothing. Stanley places it down on employee 432’s desk and sits in the chair next to it. “You’re not doing a very good job of reassuring me, you know.” He stares at it, trying to guess at what it’s thinking. He can almost see his reflection in the shiny surface. It’s so quiet he can hear the clocks ticking out of sync. He pokes the bucket; still nothing. It must be asleep. It liked to sleep when the Narrator wasn’t talking, he noticed.
Normally, this would be the kind of situation where the Narrator would pipe up with some insulting comment about how Stanley isn’t moving the story along. Stanley can feel his absence like a boulder on his chest. It gets him thinking about the skip button again, the horrific feeling of years and centuries passing without his knowledge. The two of them never really talked about it afterward; why confront the darkness when there’s new content to distract yourself with? Now he is wondering how the Narrator felt being alone for all that time, and if he is feeling the same way now. What even is time within this office, anyway? He recalls a quote from one of his college philosophy classes: esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived”. The Narrator had said something like that, about needing someone else’s attention to feel like he is real. Stanley cannot remember what it’s like to feel real, but he sympathizes just the same. He asks the bucket, “will you keep existing if I stop perceiving you?” It says nothing.
Wait. Philosophy classes? Stanley has never taken a philosophy class, he is sure of that. Suddenly he also remembers that he is not supposed to be able to speak without the Narrator dictating what he says. He realizes that these words are not his, that someone else is putting thoughts into his head and words into his mouth. A real person, he assumes. It makes sense to him. He exists, therefore he is being perceived. And if it’s not by the Narrator or the bucket, then…
Relax, I’m not about to call you out for reading this fic. That would be pretty rich coming from the person who wrote it. I’m simply stating a fact. Of course Stanley knows he is fictional. The Narrator can’t go five minutes without reminding him that he’s in a video game. And he knows that every game must have a player. And he does not know what happens when the player turns the game off. It gnaws at him, especially since he can’t actually perceive us in any way. Every time he walks these halls, he has no idea whether there is anyone playing the game or not (barring those times when the Narrator directly addresses us). It’s nice to think that sometimes there isn’t, that he can have a little bit of private time. The other possibility is that he simply vanishes, and reappears in his office the next time the game is booted up. This idea bothers him immensely, even though it makes no difference to his perception. Because one day he might fall asleep in an instant and never wake up.
Which do you think is true? Don’t worry, he cannot hear you say it.
“Esse est percipi” is a quote from philosopher and bishop George Berkeley, and is the summation of his philosophy. Berkeley was an idealist, a word which here means “the belief that ideas are the foundation of reality”. He believed quite literally that no objects exist if they are not being perceived. He contended that physical matter is an illusion, and what we think of as matter is really just a collection of sensations and experiences that exist only in the mind. For example: imagine an apple. You’re picturing what it looks like, right, the colour and texture? And maybe what it tastes like and smells like. Berkeley claimed that it is impossible to imagine an apple without reference to your sensations of it, and therefore, those sensations are what the apple is. To explain the fact that things do not vanish when no one is looking at them, Berkeley argued that there must be an omniscient God who is always perceiving everything at all times.
This is an oversimplification of his views because I’m trying to get to my point. While idealism is nonsense in the real world, it gets very interesting when you apply it to fiction. What exactly is a fictional character? What are they made of? There of course is no physical reality to Stanley or the Narrator. Words and lines of code are not material objects, they are merely vessels for an idea. Us human beings are the “gods” that bring the characters life by observing them. Ultimately all fiction is a collaboration between the creators and the audience: the creators imagine something and then give you the tools to recreate the same mental image. You know what Stanley looks like and what the Narrator sounds like, and those perceptions make them feel alive.
Imagine the apple again. Now imagine Stanley. Which image seems more real in your mind?
And yet. And yet there is that pesky skip button ending. The entire emotional weight of the scene rests on the idea that the Narrator experienced years alone without us. It would make no narrative sense if he ceased to exist for that time. Not to mention, I established just a few paragraphs above that Stanley likes to come to the escape pod ending to be alone. You didn’t question that part of the narrative, did you? You just imagined it along with the rest of the story. Which brings up the question of whether merely thinking about something counts as perception. Go back and think about the skip button again. Picture the Narrator all alone, talking to himself and slowly getting more paranoid. You never saw that happen in the game, you just got told that it happened. Is that image any less vivid to you than the image of Stanley, or the apple?
Listen, I’m not here to tell you what to think. I’m just here to get you to consider how you think about fiction, especially a story like The Stanley Parable, that so unashamedly acknowledges its own fictionality. I want to recreate a bit of the feeling I had when I first played the game, like everything I knew about storytelling was being challenged. If it eases your confusion, Berkeley’s major argument was wrong. Some people have aphantasia, which means they do not form mental images when they imagine things. (If you have this condition, I apologize for asking you to imagine all that stuff.) That proves that it is possible to imagine something without reference to sense experience. The human brain is complex and mysterious, and we don’t really know what imagination even is.
Anyway. Stanley thinks all these things, or maybe he doesn’t. I think I’ll let you decide whether he does. What he does know is that without the bucket’s guidance, his hope is fading fast. He is now not at all sure whether the escape pod will let him out of the story, nor whether he even wants to leave after all. It’s possible that leaving the story would be a kind of death for him, and not the kind he will come back from. And even if it’s not, he would be leaving the Narrator alone forever. Which means that either he also ceases to exist, or he loses his sense of self again. Despite everything, Stanley can't do that to him. He couldn’t live with that guilt.
This is the part where Stanley has to make a decision so this fic can end. And this is the last exercise I hope you can indulge me on. I've already made my decision about the ending; it’s written in the paragraphs below this one. But you can make a choice too. You can close this document and imagine Stanley doing whatever you want, and your ending will be just as valid as mine, which is just as valid as the actual escape-pod-bucket ending. All of them are exactly equally real, which is to say not at all. All of them would be nothing less than thoughts in your head.
Here, I'll give you a section break in case you need time to decide.
*
Still here? Thank you for playing along. I have enjoyed filling in for the Narrator. Now let’s send Stanley off together.
Stanley runs back the whole length of the office to his boss’s door. He jiggles the knob fruitlessly. He knocks on the door, kicks it, swings the bucket against it with a thunderous crash, but nothing opens it. He can’t hear anything on the other side. “Narrator!” he yells. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry I skipped so many times! I’m sorry I left you, I’ll never do it again! Just please don’t leave me.” He screams and cries and begs the Narrator to say something, anything, but there is only silence. No, it can’t be too late already, he thinks. He can’t just be gone.
Right?
He knows what he has to do to fix this, although it terrifies him to his core.
Slowly, he retreats back to the beginning. He climbs the six flights of stairs and contemplates the darkness at the top. If this forces a reset, then everything will be back to normal and the Narrator won’t even know what happened. If it doesn’t, well. Then he won’t be able to regret it, at least. Stanley musters more willpower than he ever has in his life, so much that even the player cannot stop him now. He places the bucket down next to the escape pod and gives it a farewell touch. It never deserved to be a part of this. Perhaps it can find a new purpose in whatever comes after, if there is anything after. He steps into the pod, and as the door closes behind him, all he can see is black.
A second or a century later, he reawakens in his office. The bucket’s pedestal is empty.