Who lives? Who dies? Who tells my story?

"What kind of story are we in?"

I’ve been grappling with this question ever since I saw it was being asked of me. I almost feel like I’m back in therapy, and my therapist has just asked me what I want to talk about, and then we just stare at each other in silence for thirty minutes because eventually the anticipation will magically get to me, and I’ll just explode in narrative dissonance discussing my problems. How selfish is that? The question is what kind of story are we in, and I’m suddenly secluding myself to my own narrative as if there aren’t billions of people in the world living their own stories everyday. In fact, those billions of people probably have some minute effect on my story, and yet I’m shamelessly still my own protagonist, JFC. Maybe, though, that’s sort of everyone’s experience? We have to have this awkward sense of awareness before we can start recognizing that we need to be better and do better because there are a billion other people in the world that we are also minutely affecting.

For class, we read Walter Fisher’s “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument.” In this work, Fisher references a past article he wrote regarding Death of a Salesman and The Great Gatsby. Fisher says: “The authors provide good reason to distrust the materialist myth of the American Dream, for what it requires to live by it and for what it does not necessarily deliver even if one lives by it ‘successfully’” (Fisher 1).  I recently watched the new Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened. Essentially, a bunch of Instagram influencers (elitists of the so called “American Dream”) falsely advertised for an extravagant music festival that thousands of people bought into- only to be met with severe disappointment. This realistic event strongly reflects the failure of the American Dream that Fisher describes, and they offer this realistic narrative that garnered a multitude of reactions. This is a story we’re all living in, but somehow we’re not all actively striving to create redefine what we call the American Dream. In fact, the connotations of “American Dream” are probably a series of narratives many of us are actively trying to remove ourselves from.

Alternatively, I recently had a conversation with a friend about the musical Hamilton, which we saw together. We both also recently read an article citing a play that is a direct response to Hamilton entitled: The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. We both agreed on the importance of making history approachable and exciting, but also inclusive of the violence that occurred in order to get to where we are. Hamilton uses language in a brilliant and captivating way, and as consumers we can respect that. However, it also does not hold regard for the violence that the “founding fathers” enacted against others. Indigenous people were slaughtered, black people were forced into labor, and women were raped. We get a slight taste of the real violence with the lines: “We plant seeds in the South. We create.Yeah, keep ranting We know who’s really doing the planting.” But, the problem remains that particular narratives are missing from this transmutation of history. Ishmael Reed’s The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda emphasizes these historical plot holes, and instead of making Miranda the villain, Miranda is shown as being a victim of consumerism. While both of these examples demonstrate extremes, they represent historical issues that continue to afflict the narratives of many people. Both narratives hold important derivatives. My friend and I agreed that Hamilton has allowed many to acknowledge a history that normally gets forgotten past eighth grade, but beyond that we literally have no control over how our narratives are represented especially after we die. Would my friend and I even be having this conversation if the musical had never come into fruition? And, while The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda may also be perceived as extreme, its underlying declarations\ is that ethical narratives are not only inclusive, they point out systematic and institutional issues that are within society’s control to not allow to slide.

These examples are the story we are living in. Well maybe the story I’m living in because I can’t really speak for anyone else.  I’m realizing as I write that I’ve literally just referred to examples of reality as reactions to performance. Performance is the ultimate consumer of stories, tbh. We all become someone else when we tell about an event we experienced, whether the event made us angry, joyful, or traumatized. When we bear witness we want to believe that’s who we are, but it’s almost always a stage. The story we are all living in is the desire to discover what’s going on behind the scenes.