nathan’s Reviews > Bibliophobia > Status Update

And yet, it was equally clear that their very insufficiencies—the moments at which they strain to meet our depths of confusion and despair and perhaps acknowledge their own failures—are sometimes exactly what we need.

And in that moment, not knowing how to move on and no longer even knowing how to start to find out, I needed a text that met me where I was: at a point where it was painfully clear that books and stories are not enough.

The Last Samurai is not a book that tries to make sense of life. It is a book that seeks answers but knows that explanations are impossible—and to attempt to give them, as Sibylla does to many a nonplussed stranger, only leads to frustration.

Of course, it is impossible to keep people from rereading and rereading and rereading a life that ends in this kind of violence, wondering if they could have been more supportive secondary characters, and to torture themselves wondering if they could have done anything—anything—to change the plot. How could I not have understood this? How could I not have known better?

The fact that I could only think of myself as a text and my friends as readers in an enclosed, safe network of narrative theoretical concepts—that is also madness.

I feel truly bad about, looking back at this whole period. The idea that killing myself would offer any kind of firm narrative closure, and therefore an opportunity for interpretation..

Books that play upon the reader’s yearning hope that more meaning can be extracted or even produced after the supposed end of a story.

Altogether, denarrative desire is basically the idea that sometimes, when you reach the end of a book, all you want to do is turn back to the first page and read it over again—but differently.

We know that our pleasure in the book and the lives we’re living through it will end at the last page, but we are compelled to move forward anyway, driven by the certainty that the only thing that ultimately bestows meaning and resonance upon a narrative is closure—the death knell of “The End.”

Perhaps I have only ever been my own ghost, my own spectral reader. If that’s true, by finally writing my own book, can I summon myself back to life?