The Snark | When the Farmer Didn’t Look Up... The First Forrest Gump

Or: How to Let the World End in the Background While Your Characters Make Soup

Somewhere in this very famous painting, a boy is falling from the sky. Wings melted, hubris punished, myth fulfilled. He’s literally drowning. And you know what everyone else in the painting is doing?

Absolutely nothing.

They’re farming. Fishing. Looking vaguely busy and/or bored. They are deeply committed to ignoring one of the most dramatic events in Western mythology. Honestly? Respect.

Before we go any further—go ahead, look up “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” We’ll wait.(Seriously. This is the link. We’ll still be here.)

Now try to find Icarus. No really, try. You might need to zoom in. A lot. Clue: he’s not flying. Or falling. He’s… flailing. Or rather, his legs are flailing. In the corner. Barely above water. He’s about to vanish forever. It’s like a Where’s Waldo of catastrophic failure.

And that’s the brilliance of it.

Behold the Power of the Oblivious Protagonist

We’re trained to think the story belongs to the one with the wings. But Bruegel—or whoever painted it—is quietly, gloriously telling us: Nah. The farmer’s the real protagonist.

That’s the guy who’ll make it through winter. That’s the guy who’ll be back in the field tomorrow. Icarus? One splash, no encore.

As W.H. Auden put it in his 1938 poem Musée des Beaux Arts:

“In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

You can almost hear the farmer thinking, “That mythological thud behind me? Not my problem. These turnips won’t plant themselves.”

Forrest Gump, Patron Saint of Shrugging

Fast-forward 400 years and we get the cinematic version: Forrest Gump. Vietnam, Watergate, Apple stock, historical whirlwinds—and Forrest just wants to play ping pong and eat chocolates. The world burns, and he’s just… running.

That’s not failure. That’s style.

In writing, this works because it mirrors real life. Most of us don’t realize when we’re living through big moments. And your characters shouldn’t either.

Tiny Clues, Big World

Writers: this is your moment to not explain everything. A character can be oblivious while the reader is not. That’s the tension. That’s the joy.

Slip in a whisper of the world’s larger drama:

“The café was half-empty. A man in the corner muttered something about all the drones flying over the town that day. She asked if they had oat milk.”

One line. That’s all you need. Your reader knows something’s coming. Your character doesn’t. Delicious.

Also: let your secondary characters shine. That janitor muttering about the price of grain? That Uber driver humming nervously to the news on the radio? That’s your chorus. Use them. Don’t let your whole novel live in a bubble where no one’s heard of 9/11, climate change, or Beyoncé.

The Icarus Move for Writers

You don’t have to write a scene about Icarus plummeting from the sky. But you can write a character in the crowd below, tying their shoelace. Or arguing with a lover. Or wondering why that guy’s yelling “I CAN FLY.”

Let the big stuff happen offscreen. The more subtle your clues, the more rewarding for the reader. You’re not spoon-feeding plot. You’re planting little mythological landmines.

A Daring Prompt (Because We’re Snarky Like That)

Now you have Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in your mind, pen a few sentences about the moment he falls—from the perspective of someone who doesn’t care. The shepherd. The fisherman. The farmer. The dog. The turnips.

Or write a scene where your main character fails to notice something massive happening right behind them—and let your reader notice what they missed.

That’s called layering. That’s what makes your fiction richer, and feel real.

So the next time you’re tempted to explain every apocalypse, every heartbreak, every meteor, remember: Sometimes the most interesting thing about a character is what they don’t see. Sometimes the most mythic moment in your book should be the leg of a drowning mythological figure waving from a distant corner.

And sometimes… being the farmer is enough.