When you are having trouble interpreting a situation you find yourself in, your instinct is to fill in the gaps. A sensible way to approach this often involves identifying what repeats and looking for patterns, themes, and motifs.
“She is always calling me at 7:00 p.m., every single day—7:00 p.m., it never changes. That’s when she finishes work…”
This, and any repeated action, becomes a motif for our character, a signature gesture that points to the theme of the woman who finishes work at 7:00 p.m.
“It has been three months… she has stopped calling me completely…”
Our character has now moved into a different part of the narrative and finds himself in a gap. Identifying patterns and themes can no longer produce a full interpretation, but it can still help him understand what she was about, where her focus lay, and ultimately eliminate some interpretations while supporting others.
“Am I making too great a leap to think that she might simply be tired? That she still wants me, but perhaps needs time…”
Our character attempts to find comfort in the repetitions and motifs he once relied on. Yet the fear of misreading remains a recurring thought that lingers persistently in his mind.
All advice is futile when dealing with such a narrative; interpretation is a delicate art shaped by many variables. Unfortunately, I do not know the author of your narrative personally. I have heard others speak of him, usually on Sunday mornings, and they describe him as rather unpredictable.
Futile does not always mean hopeless (if it did I would have used that word instead). The only guidance one might offer to a character in such a narrative (and are we not all characters, after all?) is to reconsider what is accepted as truth.
“You yourself can never tell the whole the truth for what it is. So why expect this from the author? Why demand that everything be revealed at once?”
It is possible that our interpretations (and at times our overreading, however understandable), do little to soothe our concerns. In such cases, the most productive shift is from an intentional reading to a symptomatic one. Instead of focusing solely on the fact that the woman has stopped calling, we might examine the narrative’s performative status (passing back and forth between parts we have read before and deeply reflecting, or ignore the parts we didn’t particularly enjoy), explore our own constructed meanings, and allow them to express a kind of truth, our own truth.
This kind of analysis may not serve the writer in the way his most devoted readers believe it does. But who knows? That guy rarely answers his calls. Perhaps he would appreciate a touch of postmodernism, and the idea that our truth is not determined by his writing alone, but remains, in part, speculative.
Source: H. Porter Abbott- The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
Also read: novels,doodles,STEM
