Yes, certainly, on "a day in the life" type of level.
Pretty much every historical-immersion type reality show works this way, no? I mean none of the choices TV characters make while living in the Victorian house/Colonial village/Cod fishing shack are really meaningful Choice. Yet we're fascinated by their human-level interactions and the meanings they impose on those.
I can make the case that in stories like Asimov's Nightfall (or in real world stories like Grapes of Wrath), there is no individual choice or moment that will significantly improve the characters' outlook. What's important is that the character is fully engaged in their world, and has feelings about it that we can relate to, and hopes that we can relate to. Individual hope sets tension far better than rigged externalisms, imo.
In my mind all of those are just a matter of shrinking the stage, not really removing the meaningfulness. In the context of the character level interactions, which at that point is most of the story, those minor choices matter, in the story's , even if they wont matter tomorrow, or when they leave the island or whatever. But take away the element of choice (or illusion of it, in my cynical view of US reality TV)and you loose that very hope your talking about. The whole point of those shows is to put a bunch of people under the same pressure and see watch the differences in their reactions. Im not saying they all have to teeter on the edge of Mount doom and decide the fate of anything, but without some level of conflict, even conflict avoidance, and in my head you are left with a story about a bunch of people who do what they are told adn go with the flow, without even somethign to compare it to.
The basic story pattern of Conflict arising followed by a character's interpretation of said conflict and a choice of responses. For me thats what makes a Story out of a recitation of events. If every time a choice arises the character has only one option and so always does the obvious thing... Its like a maze that never branches.
Yes. Absolutely. (And even your capitalising "choices" is making me a little uncomfortable.)
I may be coming from a slightly unusual perspective on this; my experience living with OCD is such that it is unarguably obvious to me that no amount of wish or desire (or "will" if you want to use that concept) suffices on its own to even make my own mind and body do what I want them to do, some unpredictable amount of the time, let alone affect the rest of the world. I don't, in other words, believe in free will, at least in the way it is formulated in the DV, and I find philosophical formalisations centring on and valorising free will and constructing responsibility accordingly to very easily fail in a direction equivalent to telling a paraplegic "Of course we'll get you a wheelchair but you just have to show you deserve it by running up these nine flights of stairs first."
I think we're using different values of "meaningful"; I've never been particularly sold on conflict being an essential ingredient to a story worth reading, and I am sufficiently solidly convinced that significance is entirely subjective that if you show me a character happy that their day-to-day, conflicted life is meaningful and worthwhile, sure I'll identify with that and find it emotionally congenial and reassuring.
The Capitalization is a tick that I havent managed to break, there was no particular meaning behind it. Id capitalize every third word if my hands got their way :p Im not talking about Choice in the lofty sense of Free Will vs a Deterministic Universe, just in the literary sense of choice as in possible reactions to a given plot development. However, if you want to run with the philosophical discussion, I would be fascinated by that conversation I think. You sound like you would have some great thoughts on the Choice and Self topics :-)
I think you are right about our different definitions. What do you mean by Significance is Subjective? I agree with you on the face of it, but Im not sure how that connects to the idea of a story without conflict. And I dont mean to say that a character has to have a conflicted Life, or internal conflicts to work out, or come to some lasting change, but I dont see how to make a story devoid of any conflict work. Even Tao master Whinny the Pooh occasionally got his head stuck in a tree. I could see having a lot of conflict around him, but that would probably require other less well-adjusted characters to contrast with.
And arianne, these are just some of the topics and viewpoints you can explore when you start messing with Mind Control. I hope we are helping
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