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Our narrative prison
The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent kind of story. What other tales are there to tell?
It is this discreet veiling, in fact, that enables the formula to continue to thrive alongside the evident narrative variety we encounter every time we enter an independent bookshop: from W G Sebald’s collection The Emigrants(1992) to Nicholson Baker’s novel TheMezzanine(1988) to Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital(2023). There is the Hollywood formula, engineered to provide opioid reassurance in the form of redemption and the simultaneous restoration of normality: the hero always achieves self-optimisation within the acceptable confines of bourgeois respectability (which the comedy show Seinfeld rejected with its insistence on ‘no hugging, no learning’). The COVID-19 lockdown was effectively an inciting incident on a global scale, offering us glimpses of how to live more meaningfully: building stronger ties with local communities; leaving urban areas for the countryside; discovering a greater sense of wellbeing through working at home (though, five years on, we appear to have returned to business as usual without learning those lessons – unlike the protagonists in films).
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