Interrupting Narratives

Novels and essays are traditionally supposed to start at one point, progress to new destinations, and, eventually, reach a satisfactory conclusion. The forward progress is a primary indicator of the writer's “message” to the reader. Movement of ideas within an essay suggests a progression of understanding, just as movement of characters and events in a novel suggests a progression of experience. However, many more experimental pieces of art and literature subvert this expectation to relay a different kind of message to its consumer. Works such as Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker pose that experience and meaning are not defined by a linear plot and may, when examined too closely, come to a halt altogether. In keeping with the essay’s focus, this idea will not progress throughout nor will it evolve. It is a mere fact that I will state here, show the various ways in which the authors apply it, and once again state at the end of the reading. Even the body paragraphs will pretend to start anew and conclude, teasing the reader with ideas of conclusions and destinations never met. Toggle the button above to further break the narrative of this already narrative-less essay and submerge yourself in the text.

We begin, or perhaps we have always been beginning, inside a moment that should never have been enough to fill a whole novel. G.H. stands frozen in the maid’s room, facing the cockroach which she has just come across. Instead of immediately obliterating it or running away, her disgust turns into rapture as she inspects it, looks at its face, watches its “white paste” ooze out and becomes more and more enthralled with it. Time's initial organization and pacing seems to have slipped out from under her. In The Passion According to G.H., narrative progression halts through the smallest, most innocuous, yet repulsive moment. A creature appears which she cannot bear to see and yet cannot turn away from. The moment opens with her narrating, “Up against the face that I had thrust through the opening, right next to my eyes, in the semidarkness, the heavy cockroach moved. My scream was so muffled that it was only by the contrast with the silence that I realized I hadn't screamed.” She becomes completely frozen by this moment, stuck in time and place. This is continued until the very end of the novel, after she has processed the cockroach, in multiple ways, and thinks, “Oh God, I felt baptized by the world. I had put cockroach matter into my mouth; I had finally performed the lowest of all acts.” In accordance with the pace of the opener, the scene should last a sentence, or a paragraph at most. Instead, the moment swells and spirals into a disgust and fascination so overwhelming that the initial circumstances of trivial everyday life and high society, which can be equated with plot and narrative, become irrelevant. The very word cockroach appears in the book more than 200 times. Lispector seems to want to invite the reader into the experience of coming across the cockroach and the crushing immediacy of reality. The form of and obsession within the novel becomes reflective of the purpose of the book as a means of inviting the reader into a reflection of their own experience in reality. It is this inflation of the trivial that links The Passion According to G.H. to Molloy, who is sucked in by a similarly absurd scenario with his sucking stones. “I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way.” The introduction to the stones and cockroach are not for the traditional purpose of symbolism as related to a finite message or theme from the author. If anything, they are stark reminders of the physical, reality, and humanity’s relation to both. They are merely objects, yet both summon a vortex of attention so intense it collapses forward narrative motion completely. What should be insignificant expands until it becomes a source of metaphysical pressure and perverse obsession. G.H.’s disgust and Molloy’s mathematics - and both of their fascinations - represents spaces of human experience where consciousness loops, recalculates, and obsesses endlessly. The narrative fades into the background or is obliterated completely. What remains is the extended experience and reminders of the physical world. To conclude, these are moments as slow as a snail's pace and so inwardly spiraling, that something very relatable and human flickers through its surface.

The first clear example of this deliberate slowing and thickening of narrative time appears when an entire journey becomes extended beyond recognition - the destination endlessly at our fingertips but never reached. In Kafka’s The Castle, K.’s movements seem purposeful at first, but each attempt to approach the Castle devolves into bureaucratic complications. He is always on his way, always summoned to wait, and always caught in conversations that trail off into confusing and contradictory explanations. His hero’s journey is interrupted, discarded and trampled upon. Kafka begins the narration saying, “The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there,” a line that reveals the subtle draw of the castle as well as how little the world of the story is willing to grant K.’s wish for arrival or closeness to it. The typical hero’s journey is defined by forward progress and motion, while this has the shapelessness of suspension and lack of motion. Even nearing the end of the book, he has made no measurable progress towards this “illusory” castle. He becomes more hopeless and frustrated with the false progress he’s been making thinking “there was nothing more senseless, more hopeless, than this freedom, this waiting, this inviolability.” Nabokov orchestrates a similar drawn out delay in Invitation to a Beheading, which he stages through dreamlike absurdity rather than bureaucracy - although both have a satirical feel. Cincinnatus is always nearing his execution, but the closer he gets to it, the more elastic and unreal time and events become. His death is both imminent and delayed, a fixed inevitable event - that both he and the reader knows about - that leaves him in absolute frustration throughout the book. He continuously begs to have some indication of his fate and plot saying, “I want to know why for this reason: the compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die.” It's such a simple request, and yet it is continuously denied until the protagonist loses all hope. The quote captures how Nabokov stretches the final days into a surreal duration where nothing resolves. In both novels, the journey’s endpoint - the castle and the execution - functions like an all powerful force that extends time. Unlike Lispector and Beckett, these protagonists are constantly frustrated and thwarted - instead of being enraptured - by the way the narrative falls apart. The characters circle their destinations as if endlessly circling a drain. The narrative set out in the beginning does not advance, instead, it freezes the protagonist in a fixed place, removed from his conclusion. To conclude, this stasis and lack of motion can be the story’s arc, whether to a positive end or not.

Any essay on how narrative can be interrupted must begin with the way consciousness itself becomes a slowing force, halting time from within the first person perspective. In Thomas the Obscure, Blanchot takes experiences that should barely register in narrative time such as talking, looking, and waiting, and stretches them turning the focus inward until the moments become unbearable. Page count isn’t reflective of action or progress but of the mind’s increasing self-aggrandizement. Even the act of reading within the book ceases to function as a means of acquiring meaning or moving forward. Instead, it becomes an immersive and destabilizing event. When he attempts to read, “He pitted all his strength in the will to seize it, obstinately refusing to withdraw his glance and still thinking himself a profound reader, even when the words were already taking hold of him and beginning to read him.” Blanchot collapses the distinction between subject and object, as well as reader and text. What should have been a transparent and short narrative act becomes meta, recursive, and all consuming. Language no longer points outward toward story or world but turns inward, trapping Thomas in a present moment that cannot advance. Earlier in the book, Blanchot repeats this suspension in time through images of the ocean. A seemingly innocuous dip in the water turns overwhelming and never ending: “It was then that the sea, driven by the wind, broke loose. The storm tossed it, scattered it into inaccessible regions;” The deeper Thomas sinks into perception and sensation, the less possible it becomes to distinguish anything including the movement of the story. Time ceases to unfold and instead presses inward. The ocean is a fitting symbol for this inescapable infinite form of experience. In this sense, Thomas the Obscure does not just delay plot, it interrogates the assumption that experience must move forward to be meaningful. The purpose of this extension is not simply to frustrate the reader, but to expose how reductive narrative continuity is itself. To move forward is to simplify, select and exclude. Blanchot’s slowed time resists this reduction, forcing both character and reader to remain inside moments that are usually passed over. Consciousness becomes a kind of trap where awareness doesn’t clarify but overwhelms. Thomas’s struggle represents what happens when attention loses its usual function and becomes all encompassing. The self isn’t enlightened, but dissolved and dispersed into the very act of perception. In other words, it is completely obscured. To conclude, in extending time beyond typical measurements and experience beyond typical organization, Thomas the Obscure reveals that the desire for narrative order may be incompatible with the realities of thought itself.

One way to enter this question of narrative stasis is through examples where sheer amount of detail is piled on top of itself until progress becomes impossible. These details can be scientific, conspiratorial or encyclopedic. They can be used to give readers excess information on the topic and themes of the book or overwhelm the reader with sidetracked stories. Melville’s Moby-Dick starts off similarly to other classic adventure books of its time, with the protagonist Ishmael about to head off on his journey. The book should be driven by the momentum of a whale hunt, but the story repeatedly dissolves and is replaced by digressions on whale facts and histories. In one case, Ishmael’s narration leaves the boat and journey to classify whales, warning, “I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty,” yet he attempts completeness anyway: “BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER I. (Sperm Whale).— This whale, among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvilheaded whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfisch of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words.” By interrupting the journey, Melville not only subverts the adventure genre but also seems to be trying to push it further. Consistently, Ishmael claims that there is no way to truly experience whaling other than to do it yourself. He states, “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” Melville seems to try to get as close to bringing the reader on a whaling journey and the only way he can do that is by describing the entire ship down to the individual splinter, and the entire history down to the most random of historical facts. Digression becomes the throughline of the novel, pulling us away from linearity and into overwhelming details. Pynchon mirrors this technique of overwhelming details through conspiratorial asides. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas tries to uncover and understand a complex underground system, but every clue spawns more symbols, people, organizations, rumors and fragments. Details and connections between details flood the page until their coherence becomes ungraspable. At a certain point the protagonist reflects on all that she has learned and its meaning, thinking, “Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth’s numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum.” Too many signals accumulate and the plot suffocates beneath its own weight of information. Details that should clarify the conspiracy instead corrupts it until the connections resemble a web with no center. She is completely submerged and “everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero.” Both Melville and Pynchon show how attention - whether scientific or conspiratorial - can blow up the present moment until it outweighs whatever storyline was meant to carry the reader forward. Both are strangely linked in the way the book seems to tempt us into trying to fully understand the journey - whether of whaling or of Tristero - but constantly thumbing its nose up at the reader with the never ending additions to it that can’t possibly be understood by one human brain. And if this happens to be the final example, then it ends by showing that narratives do not consist of conclusions, but of accumulating such overwhelming density of thought, detail, or meaning that the reader is placed between confusion and understanding.

This inquiry on stalled narrative could begin anywhere, but Tarkovsky’s Stalker makes the case most clearly with its visuals. In the film, movement and story consists of waiting and anticipation. The film is set up to be in the shape of a quest. Three men are traveling toward The Room, a site where one’s deepest desire is said to be brought to life. The watcher anticipates how the story will unfold once they reach this room. However, every step is drawn out. Rather than accelerate toward revelation, the journey slows down. Not only is the larger narrative slowed down, but so are the individual scenes. Tarkovsky holds his shots until the scenes seem to move in slow motion, allowing silence, dripping water, drifting dust, and the unsure dialogue to take up a majority of the screentime with grand atmosphere. As they approach the room, the guide insists on its importance, yet they do not enter. That moment should be the destination for the group and yet they can't cross the threshold. The room and zone seem to have created a sort of barrier around it of the pressure and silence. Paths must be taken indirectly, everything is tested before stepping forward. Progress appears possible and the destination is always looming in the close distance, but is continually rerouted into the ethical and existential weight of desire itself. By the time the men reach the doorway, arrival is no longer possible. The film offers no explanation as to why, only hesitation and refusal. The journey seems to have nullified the destination. Similar to The Castle, the destination is waved in front of the viewer and the protagonist as the ultimate goal, but quickly the journey overtakes the focus of the story. In Stalker, the journey is defined by the limits which prevent the protagonist from reaching the room and whatever it holds. The desire that is explored through the journey to the room is the story. In conclusion, Tarkovsky silently seems to insist that stories do not culminate by fulfilling their setup, but by lingering in the moments right before fulfillment.

Experience is not linear. It does not move cleanly from one point to another, no matter how desperately narrative tries to convince us otherwise. It loops, stalls, buckles, and refuses its own momentum. When a finite moment of experience is examined closely and when held still long enough to see the truth behind it, it halts entirely. That halt is not a failure of story but a commentary on how consciousness and experience actually works in the world. Humans live in crazed obsessions, in conspiracies, in spiraled thoughts, in drawn out instants. This idea has not progressed. It has not evolved and it stands exactly where it began. Now, having moved through these interruptions, you find yourself returned to the same fact with which you began. Nothing has changed, except perhaps your sense of how much can occur when nothing moves. What this essay has tried to show is that the purpose of storytelling does not reside at the end of a story, but in the pause that interrupts it.