Diana Peterfreund has a thought-provoking post on her blog about characterization and agency — in the sense of acting or exerting power. She writes, in part:

When you have a very normal character in a very extraordinary situation, there is a strong temptation to just let things happen to her. Let her be swept along in the tide of all the extraordinary things. Let the extraordinary people around her start making her decisions for her. I guess it works, but for my money, the really unforgettable stories are when the ordinary person overcomes these forces and makes decisions for herself. Maybe they’re the wrong decision, but at least they’re decisions.

She also makes an observation about the protagonists of Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland: Dorothy exhibits agency; Alice does not.

Another layer of interest to that comparison is that at the end of Alice in Wonderland, it’s revealed that the adventures were a dream. Alice was therefore de facto cast as a passive observer, the dreaming self, or perhaps even more precisely the waking self observing the dreaming self.

(Not that dreams must always be experienced passively; I often alter mine, sometimes scripting whole storylines — an experience very close to that of writing fiction, incidentally.)