Buffy as Storyteller

My post was inspired by Lauren’s post, which also deals with Buffy’s character. I was going to comment on hers, but then decided I wanted to expand on my departure from her ideas. While I totally agree with Lauren that Buffy shows some pretty significant doubts, I’m hesitant to say that this makes her more of a heroine. I’m more inclined to say that it makes her a more important storyteller than Andrew is.

Andrew is shown as an incredibly unreliable narrator. He ignores fairly significant information and chooses to romanticize the events occurring around him rather than accepting the terrifying facts about the upcoming apocalyptic struggle. It is true that he is using his story as an escape, but he is not simply escaping from the guilt he feels about his own part in the story, but escaping from the story altogether. He builds Buffy up as an undefeatable superhero so that he himself will feel safer against the forces of evil that surround Sunnydale.

Still, the storyteller that fascinates me more is Buffy herself. While her lecture to Andrew was a strategy to provoke his tears, the reason it worked and the reason we were able to identify with it as an audience was because Buffy was being sincere about what she said. Because she had to make Andrew cry, she was able to voice the angst that we know (through seven seasons of glimpses and occasional diatribes like this one) is pretty much perpetually present in Buffy. She admits to her own storytelling with her pep talks to the potentials, saying that she has to offer them hope that she does not feel.

As several other people have pointed out, we all are storytellers, but most of us fool ourselves just as efficiently as we try to pull the wool over everyone else’s eyes. Buffy’s problem is that the buck stops with her—everyone else can count on a miracle from Buffy (an expectation that does happen to be backed up with repeated precedents). However, Buffy can’t rely on anyone else to get them out of the apocalypse, and so her stories are all external, meant to comfort everyone else while she still deals with her internal worries. Even surrounded by a group of potential slayers (not to mention Faith, an actually “activated” slayer), there is no one to truly sympathize with Buffy. The potentials are too naive and Faith is too dysfunctional to fulfill that role.

Even when Buffy is sincere and her plan to make Andrew cry works, we see her having to snap back into the role as storyteller. Andrew, who has closed the seal and taken responsibility, has still only accepted the truth to a point. He is relieved and confirms that Buffy was never planning to kill him. While Buffy wasn’t directly planning to kill him, I got the distinct sense that she would have done whatever was required, which is perhaps a fairly recent development to her character. However, when Andrew obviously wants to believe that she would never have done something like that, Buffy lets him. Andrew, ostensibly the “storyteller” the title refers to, stops being the storyteller by the end of the episode, while Buffy continues to tell stories throughout.

Maybe in the end, this does relate to what it is to be a heroine, as Lauren suggests. Still, I think it is the act of storytelling that is part of her role as a heroine, rather than simply having the doubts that force her pep talks to be falsely confident.