The Inaccessible Inner Life of Wakefield Essay -- Wakefield Stories Es

The Inaccessible Inner Life of WakefieldAll these every the meanness and agony with bring out end I sitting looking out upon, See, hear, and am silent. Walt Whit humanity We are presented with a piece of gossip of a man named Wakefield who leaves his wife for twenty years to live in a dramatics the next street over. If this bol acey were workshopped in a present-day apologue writing class, it would be argued that this story has interesting elements but is non, as a whole, an interesting story-- that the story lies within Wakefields motivation for leaving or within the reaction of Wakefields wife upon the return of her presumed-dead husband, or that the bill of view ought to be reconsidered in order to tell the full story. practic all(prenominal)y of contemporary fiction attempts to tell the story that satisfies the collective urge to cheat another human being entirely, to finally understand another psyches story. The story of Wakefield, however, admits in the Purita n vein that the story we all want to know is actually unknowable, and can only be imagined. by means of examining the whims of others in fiction, the kernel that can be extracted, however universal it whitethorn seem coming from the voice of the narrator, is in the end a forcing out out of our own selves. Wakefield is not about the narrator, the curious dappleline, or until now about Wakefield himself. Wakefield is about the telling of these things. The first sentence presents the entire plot of Wakefield, obtained from some old magazine or newspaper, stating from the beginning that the story that follows is not only based on heresy but is, in fact, entirely heresy itself. Why would a reader continue reading when the expiry is spoiled in the first line and the story is admittedl... ...ng in our lives, and we screen it by finding meaning in his. With his grand conclusion, the narrator warns us that if you step outside the norms of a system, you may become the shipwr eck survivor of the Universe. only if what is it that really makes Wakefield the Outcast of the Universe? Perhaps every man is the Outcast of the Universe when the community attempts to interpret his whims. Why write a story that cannot be told? Why read a story that cannot be told? To sapidity as though one can tell a story, that one can read a story and be one with a narrator, to feel united, and yet to know, on some level, that we all are Outcasts of the Universe. It is both terrifying and comforting to realize that the community, united and whole, in which we pretend to reside, is in fact a faade for the community of outcasts that struggle to find meaning in one another in order to survive.