Before you begin to read the questions below, please know, I have no particular response in mind for these questions. I'd like everyone to try his/her hand at every question. It is important we start to feel safe on this blog, or I will not be able to use it. I am trying to make this helpful for all of us. I hope you can see how it is helpful to you, but without your cooperation, it does not work for me.
Respond to the final paragraph of the story please.
A. What is your reaction to it.
B. Why?
C. Explicate it (i.e., explain/interpret it).
D. What is its relationship to the rest of the story?
E. Why is it there? What purpose does it serve?
F. Remove it from the story. What difference would it make if the story ended with
the words "The sum total of these failures had hastened his death."
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I’m not a big fan of the final paragraph. One contributing factor is that I don’t believe him when he says “what I have related here is simply the accident itself.” If that was true, it would read like a police report, or a newspaper article. It doesn’t. He clearly introduces characters, giving lines to some and not to others. The song playing on the radio serves a purpose, just like the concentration on repeated colors, particularly contrasting reds and whites. Even in the final phrase he mentions the radio-repair shop again. What was on the other side of the street? Was the repair shop the only store at the intersection? Was there nothing in this entire area but road, people, and a radio-repair shop? Certainly not, and yet he chooses to draw attention to that shop. He insinuates that his piece is not “supplemented by the imagination and describing in a moving narrative,” but it is, and I have trouble understanding why he argues that he’s just relating an event.
ReplyDeleteThe point of the paragraph seems to be to reinforce his concept of Fate. There is a desire to believe in fate in order to give some measure of understanding to the random events of everyday life. Accidents happen every day, without rhyme or reason, and Xingjian wants to emphasize the idea that this is a true story that simply occurred. But it’s more than that for the simple reason that Xingjian chose to write about this day, this event, this accident. Earlier he calls the accident both “unavoidable” and “entirely avoidable,” so the last paragraph reads like a washing of the hands. He doesn’t know what to make of it, really, and so approaches from a Taoist-esque point of view. The accident just “is.”
In the final paragraph, Xingjian seems to be trying too hard to come to a conclusion about the accident. The first part of the story is the retelling of the accident, and then the speaker begins to reflect on the street cleaners, which leads to a reflection on the victim. The last three and a half paragraphs are not “simply the accident itself.” However, I can appreciate the idea of struggling to come to terms with the seemingly random death of an apparently good, if somehow flawed, man. The inconsistency between “unavoidable” and “entirely avoidable” does not bother me nearly as much as his claim that all he’s really doing is retelling the facts as they happened.
Eliminating the last paragraph would draw more attention to the would-be final lines. By stating that “these failures had hastened his death,” the speaker implies that there was a determined date for the man’s death that, apparently, was not time of the accident. The implication is that he died before he was supposed to die, and, even further, he died “wrong.” However, if one subscribes to the concept of fate then the man died at exactly the moment he was supposed to die. If the story ends this way, the juxtaposition between Fate and Accident is clear.
Unfortunately, I still have the tendency to believe a piece is completely praise-worthy when it is included in a collection like "The Story and Its Writer". But the more I focus on the composition of this story, especially when the narrator stops reporting the events of the accident and begins theorizing - the more I'm turned off by it. One prescription of good fiction is if the reader can trust the narrator. While I think the narrator of this story is honest, I don't think his viewpoint is particularly exemplary or worth demonstrating when he turns the spotlight inward. Jack Gilbert said in an interview how even though he puts himself in his poetry, it's not about him, "It's about what is important about what is happening." (From an interview in Borderlands) This story is not about the narrator, or the narrator's definition of what makes something literary or not.
ReplyDeleteThe story began as a seemingly simple recounting of a fatal accident, then it became a reflection on life. Yes, it makes sense that one set off the other, but the reflection which begins after the street cleaning seems forced. As writers, we are always trying to make sense of events, trying to convey the profundity of a situation for our readers so they can be affected by it the way we have been. Unfortunately, Xingjian chooses the wrong avenue to express these reflections, as he contradicts himself in his final sentence, "But what I have related here is simply the accident itself..." The reflections on the dead man's life read as forced guesses, even attempts to make the accident more tragic than it already was, questioning the man's marriage and intentions.
Like I mentioned above, the tone of the narration changed after the street cleaners came, when our narrator starts to question the situation. Again, this drags down the entire story - it becomes not about the accident at all, but the narrator's questioning of the accident. The story would benefit from cutting all the material after, "...flushes away any remaining traces of blood."
I suppose this is harsh, but I don't have much use for philosophical philandering in my short stories, especially when it seems to be tacked on at the end.
Again, as I mentioned before, it is clear why the narrator closes on this paragraph, and I can appreciate the sentiment of a writer yearning for closure and clarity from a disturbing event. Perhaps interweaving the questions included at the end by the narrator would have been more effective peppered throughout the story. This way, the pondering works as it should - produce thought within a story - rather than agitating the (this) reader.
I personally do not like the last paragraph of the story as I feel the author is forcing us to believe that he was only trying to relate an accident itself.
ReplyDeleteThe story reads like a view into society and not just the accident itself. Like Chris said, if he was relaying the accident and the events of the accident, there would not be a need for the "insights' of life that the onlookers are offering. Xingjian moves from the description of the accident to a commentary on the life of the man; one of questions and hypothesis.
I think the purpose of the last paragraph is not for the readers benefit but for the author's. The paragraph reads as if he is still trying to convince himself that all he did here was relate the events of the accident when infact the story is much more than that.
I am not sure if the story really needs the last paragraph. I think it confuses the reader a bit and actually make the narrator unreliable.
At first I didn't think the last paragraph was necessary or relevant. But, then I reread the paragraph above it. Because he interjects his voice in the paragraph above it, Xingjian may have felt it necessary to bring it full circle. First, he claims the death was unavoidable, he was waiting to die. Then he questions everything .... giving the reader the "answers" to the story. Then he twists the "answers" by claiming that it was just an accident. I think the last paragraph goes with the paragraph above it. Maybe the story would have been stronger -- leaving the reader with more to think about -- if he removed both of those paragraphs.
ReplyDeleteThis is a difficult story -- about social issues in China, about human nature, about life and death. Although it has value, I'm not sure I really like it.
Robin
Ah, how this discussion takes me back to Dr. Wilcox's "Disciplining History" course. During that semester, the class discussed, amongst other things, the narrative as a strategy for telling history. The musings of the last paragraph of "The Accident," to me, parallel a discussion of how that can be accomplished. Here, the narrator (presumably Gao) explains the rest of text, made up, as it is, of the various interpretive strategies those around the tragedy (including the narrator) apply. I find this interpretation to be supported by the structure of the piece itself. The first section is most immediately recognizable as the "accident itself," written in terms of objective movements, horn honkings, and the actual violence. It's as close to objective as a writer (historical or otherwise) can reach within a narrative.
ReplyDeleteThe subsequent dialogue-heavy section, while it may be equally objective in terms of the reported conversations, provides conflicting interpretations of the prior section and weighs the consequences of fate, error, psychology, bicycle construction, and so forth through various strata of observers.
This third division of the story, which concludes with the apparently controversial last paragraph, takes the narrative chronologically outside the immediate area of the accident as the evening moves in and the street cleaners erase the physical remains of the accident. The narrator provides context and interpretation by bringing in some societal commentary about anonymity in large cities and speculation about the personal life or destiny of the ill-fated victim of the accident.
Despite the obvious literary embellishment taking place here, how is this story more or less "the accident itself" than a traffic statistic or an item in a newspaper?
As to the question of how we would look at the story without the last paragraph, I think the stroy would have ended on a philosophical note. Perhaps the readers' speculation would be about fate, rather than what, in my view, is a very interesting discussion of narratives and the difficulties of an objective history.
Gao's story isn't "an item in a newspaper," neither is it "a moving narrative," although it has aspects of both. In the penultimate paragraph, the narrator philosophizes, and in the last paragraph he critiques his own philosophizing. "...life is not philosophy..." The narrator doesn't want to turn "life's tragic accidents," like the man killed under the bus, into statistics. The story is more than just a statistic, obviously, yet the narrative style is comparatively speaking emotionally detached--alienated, almost. It's as if the narrator perceives the entire chain of events (the chain of causality?) from a bird's eye perspective.
ReplyDeleteThe last four paragraphs step outside the chain of events--they are outside the chronology of the accident. These are the "philosophizing" paragraphs. Without the last paragraph, we might think that this "philosophizing" about death and fate and accidents are WHAT THE STORY IS REALLY ABOUT. But even though the last paragraph is also a "philosophizing" paragraph, the narrator directs our gaze back to the accident, and reminds us that what he has "related here is simply the accident itself..." The narrator switches from reporting events, to speculating philosophically about those events, to concluding that what he has related is "simply the accident itself." In other words, the last sentence takes the emphasis OFF of the philosophizing, even though the last paragraph is more laden with philosophies than any other in the story.
Final Note: The narrator, in the last sentence, describes that accident in the terms one might use when telling the "story of the accident" to a friend or acquaintance. The traffic-safety department might report that the accident occurred at 5:04pm, but the narrators says simply "five o'clock." The traffic-safety department might say "at the intersection of such-and-such streets," but the narrator says "in front of the radio-repair shop." These kinds of details humanize the narrator, despite the lack of an overtly "moving narrative." Perhaps the narrator's "report" of the accident IS moving after all, but it certainly isn't sentimental.