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

The Inaccessible home(a) Life of WakefieldAll theseall the meanness and agony without end I sitting looking out upon, See, hear, and am silent. Walt Whitman We are presented with a enchantment of gossip of a man named Wakefield who leaves his wife for twenty years to harp in a house the next street over. If this invention were workshopped in a present-day fiction writing class, it would be argued that this report has evoke elements but is not, 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 point of view ought to be reconsidered in secernate to tell the full story. Much of contemporary fiction attempts to tell the story that satisfies the collective urge to know another human being entirely, to finally understand another persons story. The story of Wakefield, however, admits in the puritan vein that the story we all wan t to know is actually unknowable, and trick only be imagined. Through examining the whims of others in fiction, the meaning that croup be extracted, however universal it may seem coming from the voice of the narrator, is in the end a projection out of our own selves. Wakefield is not more or less the narrator, the curious plot air travel, or even about Wakefield himself. Wakefield is about the telling of these things. The commencement exercise sentence presents the entire plot of Wakefield, obtained from round 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. wherefore would a reader continue reading when the ending is spoiled in the first line and the story is admittedl... ...ng in our lives, and we prove 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 Outcast of the U niverse. But what is it that really makes Wakefield the Outcast of the Universe? mayhap every man is the Outcast of the Universe when the society attempts to interpret his whims. Why write a story that cannot be told? Why read a story that cannot be told? To feel 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.