storyteller

I know that we think he's pathetic and all, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and admit that, honestly, I saw a lot of myself in Andrew. I mean, I'm not a murderer (or am I...) but the way he goes about involving himself--or NOT involving himself, I should say--in the lives of others hits close to home. (Perhaps too close to home? The uncanny rears its ugly head again, ho ho ho!)

Like Andrew, I also tend to see everything in the form of stories. I think they're inescapable. I think that by merely contextualizing anything in our head, literally anything, we are contributing yet another fragment to our story because we are placing that anything within some perceived sequence of events. That half-eaten bag of sunflower seeds on my shelf is an intersection of countless stories: the story of the time I got super-hungry over Fall Break and ate seeds for dinner, the story of how the seeds came to be inside the bag, the story of the man who works in the factory... it goes on and on. We tell ourselves stories all the time. We are the protagonists of our own lives... I'm thinking back to Campbell and the monomyth. We are all on some sort of journey, right? And I guess you could say that I fancy myself the narrator and the protagonist of my own life. Of course, this is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, I personally believe that the ability to narrativize one's life, in whatever capacity, is a defining characteristic of, well, perhaps not "what is human," exactly, (can't escape that class, can I?) but perhaps rather "what constitutes a higher consciousness."

...On the other hand, the compulsion for storytelling has its downsides -- a point that Buffy makes clear in "Storyteller". If there's one (intangible) thing that most every human being craves, it's the feeling of control -- and I think that the recognition of one's capacity to narrativize, to tell stories, can easily get all tangled up in that desperate need for control. Sometimes we mix up, consciously or otherwise, our own fictions and non-fictions in an attempt to control what we do and don't want included in our life story. (I'm reminded of Freud's notion of the repressed, the Jungian "shadow"... the pieces of our life's narrative that we desperately don't want to read.) I don't think anyone could bear to live in a world that was completely indifferent and utterly uncontrollable; therefore we classify, we organize, we put in sequence the elements of our lives as to resemble some kind of comprehensible coherent whole.

I think that, ultimately, this fear of non-control is what motivates Andrew, what drives him to create a new story for himself, albeit one of delusions, distortions and omissions. As Buffy says at the end of the episode:

"I don't like having to give a bunch of speeches about how we're all gonna live, because we won't. This isn't some story where good triumphs because good triumphs. Good people are going to die! Girls. Maybe me. Probably you. Probably right now."

That's a horrifying thing to hear, and it's what Andrew has been rebelling against throughout the episode. He has transformed the war from what it really is--a thing of untold violence, nearly incomprehensible in its destruction of life--into a kind of romanticized bedtime story, full of improbabilities and inconsistencies, in which the good always overcomes the evil and that someday, just maybe, against all odds, the people will live happily ever after. He believes this story because he cannot bear its alternative.

I mean, what can I say? I look to the news, to the recent revolutions of the people of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt; I look at it through computers and televisions, while I'm lying in bed or sitting in the classroom, and I read that another dozen people have died and I see a photo of a burial ceremony but I don't see the limbs bursting or hear the mothers screaming because I won't, I can't. I know that the loss of life has been an enormous tragedy and yet I don't really know anything at all; I can only hope the revolutions have lead to something better and will keep progressing toward something better yet, because they must.

And so I look back to Andrew and I think, am I really all that different?