{"id":13611,"date":"2014-10-08T16:51:33","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T20:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=13611"},"modified":"2026-03-26T09:59:51","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:59:51","slug":"let-us-compare-self-narratives-humanizing-force-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2014\/let-us-compare-self-narratives-humanizing-force-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Olivia's Blog – Let Us Compare Self-Narratives: The Humanizing Force of Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Olivia's Blog – Let Us Compare Self-Narratives: The Humanizing Force of Literature\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

It\u2019s midnight. I\u2019ve just slunk into my seat on the 96 after a long shift at work. Dan Auerbach and his grungy guitar work are asking me for the fortieth time \u201cWhy you always wanna love the ones who hurt you?\u201d and I\u2019m thinking, Dan, get over yourself, I didn\u2019t pay $1.25 just for you to ask me rhetorical questions. (Except, as it turns out, I have.) Meanwhile, I\u2019m surrounded by fashionably dressed freshmen who undoubtedly expect to \u201cYOLO\u201d the night away. They\u2019re taking selfies and sitting on each other\u2019s laps and don\u2019t seem to know exactly where they\u2019re going, but, then, it doesn\u2019t really matter, because in the downtown area you somehow always manage to find your way back to where you started. And, besides, they\u2019re still young enough to think that getting lost and stumbling home at 4 a.m. is some kind of adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m bitter. There\u2019s been a painful and prolonged relational rift in my life, and I\u2019m still reeling from the impact, quite convinced that this will be The Thing that Breaks Me. (And isn\u2019t that how it always goes?) They say that the first stage of mourning is denial, but I\u2019ve moved straight on to what-I-believe-to-be-righteous anger. Which really amounts to turning the object of my ire into the grand cause of all the irritating effects in my life. Somehow, I don\u2019t know how, but somehow <\/em>he is also the reason why my bus is late, why my coffee is weak, why I can\u2019t seem to find an outfit in which I want to be seen in public, and why Overheard at Carleton <\/em>just really isn\u2019t that funny this time. His non-presence is everywhere, hovering over me like a week\u2019s worth of lost sleep. And I despise him for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then, as happens often in the life of a literature major (or anyone who reads, for that matter), I come across a little piece of dialogue that acts as a third \u2013 and slightly more rational \u2013 party to my particular conflict. This time, it\u2019s from the character of Gwen in Elizabeth Hay\u2019s Late Nights On Air<\/em>. In a feeble attempt to explain just why she is so attached to the story of an enduring friendship between two explorers, Gwen blurts out,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI just mean sometimes people misunderstand each other after a while, and then they turn against each other. They don\u2019t want to [. . .] but they can\u2019t help it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is nothing extraordinary about the sentence itself. It\u2019s not poetic or complex. It begs no rigorous analysis. It is, plain and simple, a poorly concealed admission of personal grief. But, then, grief isn\u2019t all that poetic in the first place. It\u2019s stuttering and panicked and all over the place. And it\u2019s usually pretty undignified. Like me, sitting on a bus and judging a bunch of teenagers for, you know, enjoying<\/em> their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first Gwen\u2019s call for re-evaluation makes me even angrier. There are days (like today) when I wish we could all be separated by the designations of villain or hero. It would make Fighting the Good Fight against The Common Enemy so much simpler. As much as I would love to be The Just One, though, I know this isn\u2019t the case. I am kind and I am vindictive; I am selfless and I am self-absorbed; I am right and I am wrong; I am honest and I am deceptive; and, more often than not, I am somewhere in between those endless dichotomies. The thing is, that kind of ambiguity is hard to incorporate into my personal narrative: it doesn\u2019t allow me the opportunity to say \u2018I am this\u2019 or \u2018You are that\u2019 with any sense of conviction. And so, for the sake of my story, I decide to trust my perspective. Just as everyone else tends to do. Because, in the end, a story is all we seem to have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, if we hope for any kind of meaningful relationship in this life, it is not enough simply to acknowledge that interpretive silences exist between our stories and the stories of those we love. We need to read into those silences, and unravel the tangled mess, even if what we find reveals something less-than-flattering about our character. Sometimes the best thing we can do in the moment is to acknowledge that there are truths other than our own, and that sometimes our versions of The Truth just won\u2019t mesh with the truths of others, no matter how much we want them to. But, on balance, it seems that we\u2019re better off for engaging with those kinds of narrative conflicts. Indeed, just as a comparative analysis of texts often gives us a richer understanding of the larger literary conversation taking place in each text individually, so too do active attempts to understand the narratives of others reveal the blind spots in our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like those blissfully inebriated, selfie-obsessed freshmen, we might think that the only lens that is capable of documenting our lives accurately is the one we turn on ourselves. And there is a certain truth to that. But, every so often, it would behoove us to take a step back and compare our snapshots with those of others. Who knows? We might discover an angle that we weren\u2019t even aware we\u2019d been missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s just past 1 a.m. by the time my bus reaches the park-and-ride \u2013 right back where I started. I reach for my phone to check for new text messages, but there are none. I suppose I was expecting that my little epiphany had transferred itself to him telepathically. No such luck: untangling the threads of our misunderstanding will have to be done manually. But that\u2019s okay. Because even if I don\u2019t know when this will all be resolved (or if<\/em> it will all be resolved), I know that this story of mine feels a little one-sided without him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s midnight. I\u2019ve just slunk into my seat on the 96 after a long shift at work. Dan Auerbach and his grungy guitar work are asking me for the fortieth time \u201cWhy you always wanna love the ones who hurt you?\u201d and I\u2019m thinking, Dan, get over yourself, I didn\u2019t pay $1.25 just for you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26,27,29,25,849],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-news","category-olivias-blog","category-student-blogs","category-student-voices"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13611"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53692,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13611\/revisions\/53692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}