The End of the Story - August BOTM

[Diane]

Review thread: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Diane]

Questions by AI.

1. How does the novel's structure, with its shifts in time and focus, reflect the narrator's fragmented memories and understanding of her past?

2. How does the narrator's attempt to "end the story" reflect her struggle with the past and her desire for closure?

3. How does the narrator's relationship with the man, referred to as "him" or "the man," evolve throughout the novel?

4. What are the key moments in their relationship that are most significant to the narrator?

5. What does the novel suggest about the nature of love and relationships in general?

6. What does the novel suggest about the reliability of memory and the difficulty of capturing the past?

7. In what ways does the novel challenge traditional notions of storytelling and narrative structure?

8. How does the novel's style contribute to the reader's sense of unease and uncertainty? 

[Gail]

1. How does the novel's structure, with its shifts in time and focus, reflect the narrator's fragmented memories and understanding of her past?

In the beginning as we are introduced to both the characters, the nature of the narrator's novel and the novel we are in fact reading, we are only convinced of the narrator's confusion. We are not sure what she felt about the young man she was seeing nor why she needed the closure of writing a novel about it. However, we come to see how disciplined she is about writing only those pieces that capture some small point of what she saw as "correct", which was not necessarily the truth, or the facts, but in some way reflected the nature of the affair.


3. How does the narrator's relationship with the man, referred to as "him" or "the man," evolve throughout the novel?

She treats the man very much like someone that she can insult, be brutally honest with, can have her way with. She loves the fact that he loves her but she does not appear to love him until he leaves her and then she is wounded by the loss.


4. What are the key moments in their relationship that are most significant to the narrator?

She desires his presence more than anything else. She wants his focused attention but will settle for simply knowing where he is. The specific moments are not necessarily the most dramatic. The very beginning of the relationship is gone over multiple times, what happened at each of the three parties, what was said during each of the five phone calls. In the end, it is the leaving that she is trying so hard to pin done, exactly when and why.

5. What does the novel suggest about the nature of love and relationships in general?

The author concentrates so thoroughly on the narrator's memories, dreams and unemotional desires that one is left believing that the author believes that love is about what happens to you rather than what you give to another.


6. What does the novel suggest about the reliability of memory and the difficulty of capturing the past?

I felt that the author captured very well the fact that we believe our memories to be solid things but they are not, they shift with every recall and they are modified by every other event that surrounds them. The author implies that the past is only what you carry with you in the present and it is very unreliable.

7. In what ways does the novel challenge traditional notions of storytelling and narrative structure?

There is little to no character development other than that the narrator calms down over time and finally finishes the novel with a cup of tea. There is little drama, the key activities in the affair are not what they fought about or why but only that they did. The storytelling is reiterative and non-chronological but does build and one sees that the structure "works" for this book.

8. How does the novel's style contribute to the reader's sense of unease and uncertainty?

Particularly in the beginning, the book is very claustrophobic. I felt caught in the dreams and obsessions of the narrator but there was little to no events of any consequence to hang onto. In this way, the reader experiences some of the nature of being hopelessly caught that the narrator is attempting to convey.

[Jane]

1. How does the novel's structure, with its shifts in time and focus, reflect the narrator's fragmented memories and understanding of her past?
On pp. 82-83, she states that ordering the story is difficult because her thoughts are not “orderly – one is interrupted by another, or one contradicts another, and in addition to that, my memories are quite often false, confused, abbreviated, or collapsed into one another.” The novel tries to mimic this mental subjectivity.

2. How does the narrator's attempt to "end the story" reflect her struggle with the past and her desire for closure?
She thinks she must finish the book for the relationship to be finished with the relationship. Or maybe she believes she will finally understand her attraction to him, the reasons for their breakup, etc. if she writes about it.

3. How does the narrator's relationship with the man, referred to as "him" or "the man," evolve throughout the novel?
As she describes it, she experiences a “hunger” for him first and that is followed by a growing tenderness and even fascination. Later in their relationship, she says she feels uncomfortable around him and feels little emotion for him. Obviously that changes at some point because she basically starts stalking him when the relationship ends. It was never clear to me why that happened unless, as the cliché goes, she only wants what she can’t have.

4. What are the key moments in their relationship that are most significant to the narrator?
Their first meeting and their final meeting are important, as are their arguments, which she can count and describe in some detail, although she can’t always remember or is deliberately vague about why they started.

5. What does the novel suggest about the nature of love and relationships in general?
That they are fleeting, ephemeral.

6. What does the novel suggest about the reliability of memory and the difficulty of capturing the past?
She is very explicit about the difficulty of writing about the past on p. 106: “I see that I’m shifting the truth around a little, at certain times deliberately. I am rearranging what actually happened so that it is not only less confusing and more believable, but also more acceptable or palatable. […] there are things I like to remember and others I do not like to remember." Additionally, on p. 122, she says that what she imagined the man was doing while absent during their fifth quarrel seemed “stronger,” more real than what he confessed he was actually doing. So even in “the present,” the mind plays tricks.

7. In what ways does the novel challenge traditional notions of storytelling and narrative structure?
The author “talks” to us about writing the book, the challenges she faces and choices she makes about what to include and not include, what she remembers correctly and what she may just be making up.

8. How does the novel's style contribute to the reader's sense of unease and uncertainty?
I really didn’t feel much unease or uncertainty. We know from the beginning that she and the man will break up. Perhaps I felt some unease about what she might do after the breakup, when she is going through the worst of her grief because she does some stalking that is really embarrassing.

[Kristel]

1. How does the novel's structure, with its shifts in time and focus, reflect the narrator's fragmented memories and understanding of her past?

it demonstrates through the structure the disorder of memories; how our memories can be false, abbreviated, confused, collapsed

2. How does the narrator's attempt to "end the story" reflect her struggle with the past and her desire for closure?

ending a relationship can be very hard even when we know it is for the best but I also think this reflects how authors struggle to know when their writing is really done and how to end the stories that they write. I think it is why many endings of books simply are not very good or satisfying.

3. How does the narrator's relationship with the man, referred to as "him" or "the man," evolve throughout the novel?

First they meet and it is all superficial, then it grows until he becomes dependent and obsessive then it begins to disintegrate though the obsessing doesn't end as fast as the relationship does

4. What are the key moments in their relationship that are most significant to the narrator? the beginning and the end and the arguments in between

5. What does the novel suggest about the nature of love and relationships in general?

well in this case, which I don't think is really love, it is quite self centered.

6. What does the novel suggest about the reliability of memory and the difficulty of capturing the past?

false, unreliable just like narrators are generally unreliable

7. In what ways does the novel challenge traditional notions of storytelling and narrative structure?

This structure was based on memory but I think it also shows that Lydia Davis is probably a better poet than novelist

8. How does the novel's style contribute to the reader's sense of unease and uncertainty?

there is a lot of walking around in the dark, laying in bed, curtains closed

[Jenna]

The comments above are excellent, so I feel drawn to mostly talk about #7, the structure, which is actually what I loved most about this. We have a novel about writing a novel - its not even clear that the parts which we are reading that directly detail the relationship are going to make it into the finished "novel" or just represent fragments that she is collecting in her various boxes as perhaps ready to be used. As Gail said above, this very beautifully captures the shifting and insubstantial nature of memory and how we craft narrative for ourselves. It also lets us in on how much of an unreliable narrator she is because we can see how much more of a self-centered jerk she is when thinking about writing about the relationship than when actually purporting to give us sections of the story. This ties in with the title, with starting with the closing scene, that all narrative is ultimately self-serving in that it creates linearity and cadence and meaning out of events that may not have them.

As to #8, I was a bit disconcerted at the beginning because she is deliberately not giving us the names of location and yet is so specific with the details that I knew it was the City Lights Bookstore in SF. And she sticks so closely with her own life details that it is hard not to feel like you are reading memoir. But I think that is a deliberate feint. My unease through most of this had to do with how much of a stalker she is, and then the growing understanding of how much of a jerk she was to him as it was going along.

[Rosemary]

1. How does the novel's structure, with its shifts in time and focus, reflect the narrator's fragmented memories and understanding of her past?

The narrator attempts to understand the past relationship by splitting it into related pieces then putting it together in a different way, in the form of a story.

2. How does the narrator's attempt to "end the story" reflect her struggle with the past and her desire for closure?

She ends the story by writing it out. She failed to find the man, who has married and moved away, so she finds closure in narration.

3. How does the narrator's relationship with the man, referred to as "him" or "the man," evolve throughout the novel?

Even though it's not told in chronological order, the relationship becomes more about separation and conflict towards the end of the novel.

It's interesting that he never has a name, while her current partner, Vincent, does.

4. What are the key moments in their relationship that are most significant to the narrator?

Her trips away from the west coast to the east.
Each of them being "in love" in turn, but never at the same time.

5. What does the novel suggest about the nature of love and relationships in general?

I think it suggests that love is a hit and miss thing. Friendships seem much more reliable. On the other hand, the narrator's relationship with Vincent seems stable, and her being prepared to live with his father suggests she is a very different person from her past self in the relationship she is writing about - or at least that she is using her present life to give that impression.