A Story About Idiots
The opening paragraphs of the novel situate the centerpiece of the story. The author writes a simple declarative sentence asserting what, at heart, the book is about. The imagery is by no means fancy or filled with poetic tricks of the trade and the literary devices, but it gets the job done:
“A bank robbery. A hostage drama. A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point, much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea.
This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.”
The Grammar of Death
A certain phrase is repeated often enough to qualify as imagery. The idea behind the imagery is that difference between the living and the death comes dhttps://na172.lightning.force.com/lightning/page/homeown to a question of tense. It is, of course, not the full story but in its simplicity, it contains a truth that is heartbreaking:
“The hardest thing about death is the grammar, the tense, the fact that she won’t be angry when she sees that he’s bought a new sofa without consulting her first. She won’t be anything. She isn’t on her way home. She was.”
Who Are We?
This is a question that has been a tricky trough for philosophers to drink from since the beginning of self-awareness. What constitutes who we are? What makes someone the person you think they are?
“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
Not a Story About Idiots
About seventy pages or so after the opening assertion of what this story is about, the narrator seems to have a change of heart. By this point, the cast of characters have been introduced with enough interaction for the reader to determine whether they qualify as idiots or not, but the narrator is perhaps no longer quite so confident:
“The whole thing is a complicated, unlikely story. Perhaps that’s because what we think stories are about often isn’t what they’re about at all. This, for instance, might not actually be the story of a bank robbery, or an apartment viewing, or a hostage drama. Perhaps it isn’t even a story about idiots.
Perhaps this is a story about a bridge.”
