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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 07/08/2014 14:49, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:entonio@gmail.com">entonio@gmail.com</a>
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote
cite="mid:BA6B2B84-368F-45B0-ACEF-867CD9F0670D@gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div>No dia 06/08/2014, às 14:22, Gerry Quinn <<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:gerry@bindweed.com">gerry@bindweed.com</a>>
escreveu:<br>
<br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 06/08/2014 14:07, Marc Aramini
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote
cite="mid:CAF1072z43_zYqcwaZOey1rM_DEC1uBpB4-bxX6rZ06u2vjudKA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">I wrote this step in the exegesis just for you,
Gerry ;)
<div><br>
<font><span style="background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0)"><font>1)</font><font> </font><font>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.</font></span></font></div>
</blockquote>
<br>
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.<br>
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<font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023a3"><br>
</font>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023a3">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?</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023a3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023a3">(I like guns
that don't end firing, but they'd better be surrounded by
others that do.)</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023a3"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023a3">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.</font></div>
</blockquote>
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.<br>
<br>
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.]<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
- Gerry Quinn<br>
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