Life as a Story Collection

[Walter Cummins]

One of the most convincing books I’ve ever read is Frank Kermode's 1967 The Sense of an Ending, in which he argues that most people after years of immersion in fictions consider their lives as implementing the pattern of a novel, following a narrative arc that rises to a fulfilling culmination. Our existence is like a bildungsroman that mirrors the teleological expectations of Western culture.

We like to believe we achieve a conclusion that is meaningful and purposeful with, like a good novel, a beginning, middle, and end. Kermode says that is because humans are disturbed by the notion that their life is just a brief moment in the expanse of time. In truth, according to Kermode, our lives are just a series of experiences that are ends in themselves.

What does this theory have to do with fiction writing? For once thing, it helps to explain why the great majority of readers prefer novels to stories. Novels often dramatize or imply the full story of one or more characters' lives. If not the complete life, they focus on the central situation and come to a resolution that captures who that character truly is and the reality to follow. Jane Eyre’s "Reader, I married him" conveys a fulfillment in which the character has solved and triumphed over her life's issues--the completion of her arc. Whatever happens next will just play out that achievement. Her life has realized its inherent meaning.

Like Kermode, I don't believe our lives play out a teleological arc. Instead, I see each life as a collection of short stories, some of which are happening simultaneously or as an episode within another story.  While each of those stories may come to a resolution, they are not cumulative aspects of a larger encompassing narrative, just pieces accumulating to make up the total of our experiences.

Let’s consider a person’s love life. Most of us have several or more relationships, perhaps a marriage or two of many years. The combined depictions of each relationship could be a story collection, the happenings within a marriage another. But while those stories are taking place, we have our childhood stories, our work stories, our travel stories, our friendship stories, and on and on. Finally, there’s our dying story that may take place decades after "Reader, I married him/her.” 

Sometimes when we tell one story, another may have a connection, but most often our various collections are taking place simultaneously and separately.

Friends disagree with me—and with Kermode—believing that all we do is linked by threads that may be cause-effect, and ultimately that our existences are unified by what may be called our essence. One friend, a psychological therapist, is not satisfied by short stories because they leave out so much of characters’ backstories and, therefore, the roots of their behavior.

I know novelists who are motivated by a similar need. When they have what they first think is a story idea and begun writing, they find they want to know so such more about their characters, the full context of their existence, how they got to the state of the activities of the initial story idea. As the result, what they end up with is a novel.

Of course, from an autographical basis, we can—as many writers have done—take one aspect of our lives and turn that into the core material for a novel. Yet that is just one aspect selected from the many stories we have experienced. It may be the one that strikes us as most significant, overshadowing all the others.

In a previous posting, I speculated on why book buyers prefer novels to story collection. I think they want what they consider the big picture, the fictional arc of a life.

Short story writers and readers are content with the bumps in the road.