(urth) Short Story 81: Suzanne Delage

[Gerry Quinn]

On 07/08/2014 14:49, entonio at gmail.com wrote:
> No dia 06/08/2014, às 14:22, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com 
> <mailto:gerry at bindweed.com>> escreveu:
>
>>
>> On 06/08/2014 14:07, Marc Aramini wrote:
>>> I wrote this step in the exegesis just for you, Gerry ;)
>>>
>>> 1)That an extraordinary event actually could be forgotten, so that 
>>> he can't be trusted to reliably remember it. If he could remember 
>>> it, then the premise of the story is invalid. If we do not accept 
>>> this premise, the analysis can stop right here -- the extraordinary 
>>> event in his life is that he never met Suzanne Delage.
>>
>> Indeed, that is the extraordinary event.  The point of the story is 
>> its implications.  There's also the question of *why*, to which it 
>> seems we are given no answer.
>
> You mean to say Wilfe wrote a story with a foregone unremarkable 
> conclusion? Why write it at all? In which act is the gun fired?
>
> (I like guns that don't end firing, but they'd better be surrounded by 
> others that do.)
>
> That the narrator hasn't forgotten the fact that he never met SD 
> automatically prevents it from being an extraordinary event that has 
> been forgotten. Not to mention that it isn't an event at all.
He did forget it, or at least it never percolated to the forefront of 
his consciousness, until he started trying to think of a remarkable 
event in his life, and could not.  Then it came to him that there was a 
remarkable non-event he had thus far forgotten.

The gun is fired - as is often the case - at the very end, in which he 
sees and responds to the girl who is her image.  [And when we are short 
of tangible pieces of a story to grasp, is it not reasonable to reach 
for the beginning and end as standing out at least because of their 
unique locations in the sequence?  Note, then, that the parts of 
'Suzanne Delage' crucial to my interpretation are right at the 
beginning, and right at the end.]

In the introduction to 'Endangered Species', Wolfe notes that every 
short story must have "at least one event to narrate, though in a few of 
these stories you may have to search carefully to find it". There are 
many events of a sort in Suzanne Delage, though for the most part they 
appear rather quotidean, and mostly happen to other people.  Only one 
event seems to stir any emotion in the narrator.

- Gerry Quinn
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