Master Class Lecture Series for Lit 13: Introduction to Fiction, Second Semester, SY 2016-17, Ateneo de Manila University

From our last conversation, we underlined three basic principles of Fiction as we oriented ourselves in about the workings of plot and character: (1) Fiction is basically a sustained telling or unfolding of an event; (2) Fiction is a worlding, that is, a creation of another reality which may be similar to or different from our lived reality, and because of this, proposes some form of comparison, examination, or rumination; (3) Fiction is the work of imagination.  All three must be remembered and reviewed as we begin to pursue a discussion of another fictional element, point of view. Considering that point of view is often described as who tells the story or how the story is told, the first principle suggests that in order for a sustained telling or unfolding to take place, there must be an intelligence or consciousness framing or focalizing the whole story. Our keyword here is framing, and this intelligence or consciousness—usually described as a narrator (who may be one of the characters in the story)—is making an effort [consciously, or even unconsciously, since that is possible] to be the instrument of seeing for us readers. We witness the unfolding of the event because of the teller of the tale, and in our reading practice, we normally distinguish the author from the point of view, since we consider it as a construct, as part of the whole make up or composition of fiction. We suspend our disbelief and participate in this illusion of a narrator sustaining the unfolding of the story and we believe the breadth and depth of its selection and combination of details as well as its ordering of events. While we are aware that the hand of the writer is always observable in the movement of the story, making it move here or there, twisting it at some point, or making readers anticipate in suspense, Fiction lends us this beautiful illusion that indeed, someone [or sometimes, something] is telling us this story. This transports us to an attitude of attention towards this moment of telling that is the story, which worlds an experience that merits our consideration, as the second principle proposes. To continue following a popular metaphor, the point of view serves as a camera zooming in and out of other characters’ minds or advancing conjectures and speculations according to what it had been designed to see. We see the world, this other “lived reality” because this narrator assembles and directs the process of worlding. By trusting the teller, we see a space—which we call setting—thrive not only with physicality but more importantly, with the motivations and actions of people. The point of view does a lot more things than description. It may be prescribed to immerse itself as a main or one of the supporting players in the story’s action; it may also ordain itself as a witness to all events across the story’s landscape; it may also choose to report in a removed or involved way. All these depend on the decision of the writer as he/she decides to frame the story. These attitudes, as we often call them, affect the shaping and reception of the story. It may make one sympathetic or indifferent towards fictional characters. It may also configure the way we as readers understand the fictional event based on how the point of view regards it: is the narrator suggesting an idea about the story he/she/it has witnessed [of course, he/she/it always does]? The medium, as they say, is the message, and the point of view, as the fictional medium of witnessing the story’s event, embodies a “message,” a thought or meaning for and about the story. The story as imagined, let us remember, is not imagined for imagination’s sake, but to evoke a thing or two about significant human experiences. And part of Fiction’s ploy is to create a make-believe experience, a form of contrivance as the word’s etymology suggests. As “dissimulation” (to pretend), “ruse” (scheme or ploy), “invention,” and “fabrication” [considering Fiction’s Old French origin ficcion], Fiction does not pretend to be factual as it is more interested in engaging the probable [although it is completely possible that it taps elements form real life to build its crafted reality]. As it creates worlds, it also creates the means by which these worlds may be seen. The narrator is a constructed being that mediates and intervenes in the conception of fictional worlds. For Fiction to be true to its being a work of the imagination, someone (or something, as I have said earlier) must be causing this imagination. There must be, as St. Thomas Aquinas once said of the dynamic universe, a prime mover, an intelligence that makes everything move.  To imagine, according to etymology, is to form a mental image or picture, to form an image, or to represent. Any form of storytelling participates in the act of imagination, but Fiction elects itself to impart a full range of probabilities that furnish readers various ways of witnessing worlds and fictional events.  In Fiction, one is not only limited to the character him/herself telling the story; there are other probabilities around him or her that can contribute a unique mind picture or imagination of what is happening. Paradoxically, points of view delimit and extend the vision of witnessing and enables the assumption of various, probable consciousness, which ordinary storytelling—for instance, news, history, or even your daily gossip or tsismis—does not usually afford us. Point of view precisely makes Fiction fiction, and distinguishes it from its deemed opposite, Nonfiction. While nonfiction may use fictional techniques, as in what they call today as “creative nonfiction,” its storytelling is confined to the limits of human mediation—whether its supposed “narrator” [the journalist, historian, or memoirist] decides to immerse in or distance from the story. In Fiction, a point of view may decide to be God, a lowly human, or a speck of dust; the difference will definitely show. It may even decide to radically  transform, as in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The point of view is part of the artifice of language that tells one a story, quite distinguishable from narrators [writers, or even interviewees] of/in nonfiction, who may pretend to dissolve themselves in the telling despite their being very much present in their narrative or portray themselves as main characters of their life stories [as in autobiographies]. Nonfictional discourses have respective “narrators” deemed to perform certain tasks: for instance, news means to inform (or misinform, depending on intent); history opts to remember (or even forget); their “points of view”, if I may be allowed to borrow it here, are shaped by their discursive design. In Fiction, points of view indeed offer points of view, ways of looking, considerations to experience. If we pursue point of view as also considerations of experience, this element may be seen as enabling us to actualize notions of perspectives which maybe be quite arduous in ordinary discourse. Points of view are part of the trick of Fiction’s imaginative project. They frame how stories are to be told, as they also characterize their ways of seeing. They help us overcome the limits of our seeing and perception.

To continue following a popular metaphor, the point of view serves as a camera zooming in and out of other characters’ minds or advancing conjectures and speculations according to what it had been designed to see.

There are four conventional points of view known to readers of Fiction: (1) the omniscient point of view; (2) the third person limited point of view; (3) the objective point of view; and (4) the first person point of view. All are employed to convey and characterize specific ways of witnessing the unfolding of a story-event. The omniscient point of view, understood as a God-like perspective, has unlimited knowledge and prerogatives, and is free to inhabit the consciousness of characters at will. This point of view tells all about motivations, behavior, and action, and because it can access the minds and hearts of characters, offers a broader understanding of human relations and conflict and how both make the story, as particular sweeping stories are designed to do. We suspend our disbelief and surrender in awe to the intelligence who had yarned together all that is needed to be known. Omniscience, which etymologically means “all knowledge”, probably sits in consciousness because of our initiation to the epic, the grandest and most communal among stories that emerged from the human imagination. The Iliad and the Odyssey are our exemplars in the Western Canon, where we are made to witness (and re-witness) the exploits of men destined for glory, the tragedy and persistence of women, and the integration of great civilizations. Homer, the traditionally ascribed author of the epics, is believed to be blind, but has been an encompassing teller and witness of all action, from the events of the end of the Trojan War up to the glorious return of Odysseus in Ithaca, after years of itinerant exile. Before the birth of the printing press and books, tellers or chanters are carefully elected by societies to memorize epics, which basically encapsulate the history of the community. The epics have to be memorized in ordained and mnemonic forms like poetry so they may be preserved for generations. As device, the epic’s omniscience may be traced to the need to enthrall an audience’s imagination and transport listeners to a time and place of greatness which members of the community must always remember, along with the values the heroic figures embody. In Philippine folk literature, I always remember the epic of my Ilocano homeland, Biag ni Lam-ang, the Life of Lam-Ang, the “oldest recorded” and “the only complete epic to come down to us from the Christian Filipino groups,” according to Damiana Eugenio. The omniscient narrator follows Lam-Ang, literally, from womb to tomb, and characterizes the hero as a superhuman figure, wishing for his own name as soon as he was delivered, ably defending himself in all battles, and resurrecting after his final encounter with a shark. He also builds the story by going into the minds of Lam-Ang’s mother Namungan and his wife Dona Ines Cannoyan, who may easily remind one of Odysseus’s wife Penelope. These two play major roles in this epic, and serve to strengthen the triangulated narrative which offers a glimpse to Ilocano culture, despite Spanish encroachment, as can be seen in the uses of the terms “don” and “dona” before the names of characters, and the reference to baptism when Lam-Ang requested for his name, to name a few. This culture embodies strength as it is able to completely resist colonial culture and reiterate its community’s story of courage and power. While the narrative is much smaller in scale than the first one we have mentioned, the omniscience of the narration is present, as in all other Philippine epics, which amount to hundreds, and still counting [and I suppose that makes up for scale; our stories put together are myriad and might be longer than the Iliad, Odyssey, and all the western epics combined]. Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, utilize a particular kind of omniscience to a certain extent, but as we know, the supposed “narrator” who has put together the rise and fall of the protagonist Juan Crisostomo Ibarra, shows his hand every now and then, as he offers commentaries or pokes fun at the hypocrisy of both colonizer and colonized. Meanwhile, the third person limited point of view is a perspective that follows one character, major or minor, in the story. The story is filtered through the said character, and since the emphasis here is on the word limited, how the story is conveyed or framed is shaped by this character’s biases, actions, and motives. The third person limited point of view is a frame by which readers view a very focused, but distant perception of the world. This character being pursued by the narrative is seen as participating in the unfolding of an event. The narrator relates how this character grew into an awareness of his/her situation, and oftentimes lays down indications about how the processes of transformation took place. If the omniscient narrator lends a sweeping account of an event, or a series of interrelated events, where characters interact and are ingenuously observed by an all-knowing narrator, the third person limited point of view elects a person in the story to follow, describes his/her impulses, traces back his/her past, unravels his/her mind, and ultimately, bares his/her soul. All these are carried out while the narrator ironically sports, all at the same time, distance as a third person perception and intimate knowledge of the character in focus, whatever the circumstance. Last time’s story, “Love in the Cornhusks” by Aida Rivera Ford, is a story told in the third person limited point of view that followed Tinang as she came to terms with her life choices. The narrator helped shape Tinang’s process of enlightenment by showing, not only what truly mattered in the end, but how she achieved epiphany. When the narrator said: “Among the cornhusks, the letter fell unnoticed,” the action became indicative of the realization. The narrator does not just tell it, but shows it in a more intelligent, powerful way.

The first story for consideration today, “First Rain” by Raymund P. Reyes, also sports a third person limited point of view following the story of a certain Mr. Malpas who works as a teacher in the Middle East. In the story, the narrator allows us to witness what Mr. Malpas saw, and how he perceived the interesting turn of events in school after it had started to rain. Through this filtering, our attention has been focused on the perspective of Mr. Malpas, from the time he had “finished calling the roll”, right to his dilemma of calling off classes and his sudden remembrance of home and childhood rains, up to his “defeated” resolve and returning of “the chalk to its box.” It is a very compact story which shows very little about the circumstances of Mr. Malpas’s decision to teach in the Middle East [the very general term for the setting, actually, which is illustrated by the details of the “gusts of flying sand” and the rain’s pouring “a day—or a few intermittent hours throughout a week, at most,” as well as the reference to “this Arabian city”, that locates him, and transports us readers, to Saudi Arabia, a traditional Overseas Filipino worker (OFW) destination], his life back in the Philippines, and his work of educating foreigners. Despite its shortness, as it is, a very short story, it echoes shared OFW and diasporic experiences brought about by the need to support one’s family and the lack of opportunities back home. As we follow this story’s point of view, which by implication, also compels that we recall similar experiences and bring them with us in our reading, we are made to append our common understanding of this decades-old complex Filipino phenomenon to the desolation that descended upon Mr. Malpas, who in the end of the story was “empty” like his deserted classroom, as “(s)tudents gathered on the lawn, dancing like frogs, their white robes clinging wet upon their skins.” His students are generally warm, but are primarily being what they are—children longing for rain in a desert climate. The story presents this stimuli for the conflict, which brings Mr. Malpas to decide on whether he would “finish his lesson for the day,” so that “children could go and enjoy their rain.” What was going through his mind is typical teacherly predicament; he has a lot to consider: “He was giving a quiz on Wednesday. He had spent an afternoon last weekend making it. He opened the desk drawer and took out a piece of chalk. He had an hour, he decided.” As “(a)ll eyes were on the spectacle on the horizon,” he had no recourse but to let the thunderstorm enthrall his students. However, as “(h)e stared out the window and hoped that it would stop,” he is gripped by what we can imagine as a usual ache: “Suddenly, he felt homesick.” The succeeding narration provided by the third person limited point of view gave us a glimpse of the Mr. Malpas’s inner life which contains much of tender memories from back home: “It rained the whole year in Batanes [where he probably hails] but it had been months since he left the country to teach in the Middle East. He loved those heavy dark clouds too, especially when lightning crisscrosses their breadth. When he was a child, his mother would watch with him as they sat on the rocking chair on their porch. It was like somebody in heaven was taking pictures of the earth, she would say. Afterwards, the rain would pour and mother and son would shift their focus from the sky to the ground, following raindrops as they splattered and broke on the glass.” Observed closely, the narrator has not only entered and unraveled the consciousness of the character [where his thoughts, considerations, and motivations are to be found] but also his memories, which he conjures in that moment, perhaps as the character tries to cope with homesickness. When his students leave the room, his isolation becomes more acute and the narrator zooms out to give us a bigger picture of his own internal darkness as a migrant worker: “When the room was empty, he stood and peered out the windows again. Students had gathered on the lawn, dancing like frogs, their white robes clinging wet upon their skins.” The narrator has strived to reveal the sadness and longing of this teacher who had found both comfort [because of memories of home] and affliction [being disturbed by the weather (we may surmise that he is a very conscientious teacher) and displaced by economic constraints (which led to his working abroad anyway)] in the pouring rain. The narrator’s diction (choice of words) shows how the perspective intends to persuade readers to empathize with Mr. Malpas’s position: “When the room was empty, he stood and peered out the windows again. Students had gathered on the lawn, dancing like frogs, their white robes clinging wet upon their skins” (italics mine). The emptiness in Mr. Malpas’s being, magnified and deflected in the emptiness of the room, is contrasted with the innocent joy of thrilled, rain-drenched children, “dancing like frogs.” Imagine this same scene rendered in the objective point of view, described as a reportorial perspective that simply narrates the story’s unfolding without commentary, interpretation, or inhabiting a character’s mind. It would probably take a whole lot of revising diction to do that, making the whole story sound like a mere report of the unfolding, which may start with the rain pouring, evolve with the teacher and students having a little discussion about calling off classes, and end with the teacher looking out of the window while students are rain-soaked, playing in the rain. The end. My attempt of a report already looks very bare, but it is just one of the possibilities. Conventionally, the objective point of view, also called the dramatic point of view, narrates as a spectator, putting together what is to be seen and heard from the story. Its only mediation, so to speak, is its quiet witnessing. While the objective point of view is believed to be a more speedy form of narration, I suspect that it will take away all the conjured effect of isolation distance from the homeland brings in Mr. Malpas, who was dramatized as severed from all the joyous abandon outside the window. The quiet witnessing of the objective point of view might not be able to provide the necessary contexts of his being away from home, unless it provides a tedious flashback. The story’s parameters and form however render it impossible.

The emptiness in Mr. Malpas’s being, magnified and deflected in the emptiness of the room, is contrasted with the innocent joy of thrilled, rain-drenched children, “dancing like frogs.”

The final mode of narration, the first person point of view, may be observed in our second story, “Mother, Mother” by John Bengan. This compact story, which juxtaposes the accounts of two mothers of what has long been called extra judicial killings (now sanitized by the state as “killings under investigation”) that befell their sons, is a very relevant one nowadays. Back in the year of the story’s publishing, (2007), it was already making a sharp commentary about the ruthlessness of this so-called war on drugs, which appears to be going on for quite awhile in the Republic of Davao City. The first one is narrated from an obviously privileged perspective, based on how the mother characterized herself: the mother is clearly one with entitlements, property, and mobility (“I was in Cagayan de Oro when it happened, busy talking my sister through an annulment”; “I had gone completely mad, dropping the phone on the wool of the carpet of my husband’s Land Cruiser”; “Weeks passed and I flew to Canada, where no one really knows about me and my son.”); the second one was from that of one from the fringes, of a mother who was “selling grilled pork and entrails” in a typical city street. Both were recounting the unfortunate moment of learning about their son’s deaths, deftly connected by media and police with dangerous drugs. Characterization is key in apprehending the first person point of view, where an “I” is chosen to assume not just the focus but also the central intelligence of the story. The character of the narrator shapes the story’s ways of seeing. All these are affected by the narrator’s biases, behavior, and motivation. Whether the story elects to narrate in the first person inhabiting the minds of a minor character (one who might simply provide a somewhat passive perspective to the story’s unfolding) or a major character (who usually is the subject of the story, actively and vicariously living the story’s unfolding), the narrator’s hints about him/herself must be accounted for. We began reading Bengan’s story by looking at the class differences of the mother, which is easily discernible. But since this is a story of juxtaposition, it is asking readers to see any difference among (1) the way the mothers responded to the news of the deaths and how they coped; (2) the way they perceived or even judged their sons’ alleged drug involvement; (3) the way they lived their lives after the fact. Towards the end of the second mother’s narration, and of the story as a whole, the killings never end, as “a body of a thirteen-year-old” was found “on the edge of the Bankerohan River.” “The boy ran drugs for dealers around our place,” the mother said, as she remembers that that same day, when the body was found, “I was at the cemetery, cutting the grass around my son’s headstone.” The story hints that the two mothers are connected by the fact that the second mother’s son “worked as a carpenter” at the furniture shop of “another man who was killed, right outside his own house” (italics mine). This phrase echoes the second sentence in the first mother’s narration: “Actually, he was killed, shot in the head like some goat, right outside his home in a village on the upper side of Matina.” Both were devastated by the news. The first mother was away, “snaking through traffic” when she heard about it through a phone call made by her frantic daughter. She described herself as having “gone completely mad”, weeping “soundlessly” and long, “as if some demon pulled a switch inside my body and set free decades worth of unexpressed anguish.” The second mother, meanwhile, characterized the moment as not only crushing but disabling, as she was made to “run after something” upon hearing the screams Your son! Your son!: “I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move my legs; I thought of flying.”  However, a very telling line seems to imply what the neighbors know, and that which the mother chose to be silent about: “I was stunned when I saw the look in my neighbors’ eyes, as if they had known this day would come.” It took time for both distraught mothers to see their dead sons, who were both diminished as criminals by news reports [on the part of the first mother: “From the broadsheets I learned that a motorcycle-riding gunman took his life. Police told me what they could: I raised a criminal who smuggled cocaine from foreign lands” (this statement may come to a reader as quite ironic, since it is as if the mother does not know anything about her son); on the part of the second mother: “In my house, these people (referring to the “television crew”) asked about our life, about my son. They wouldn’t go until they get it right (so, who is really determining who they are?). So I told about him, the son I lost, he was too young, my eldest who was a dreamer. But they wanted to hear about the pusher.”]. While it is interesting to find out whether the sons were indeed involved in drug trade, both mothers, in their anguish, focus on the pain of loss, which in the story connects them despite their apparent differences. A commentary that may be possibly culled about these juxtaposed narratives would be how these killings cut across classes and how these essentially dehumanize both the victims (for they have never been brought to court for the supposed crimes), and their bereaved. In our earlier reference to the sons, we have already shown how sensational media treats them as mere figures for the drug war’s data. On the other hand, the mothers, in their narrations, were diminished and battered by the news of their son’s death: [on the part of the first mother: “With the news of my only son’s death, my body ached for nourishment”; “Torment coiled in my chest like a serpent, and this hole widening and deepening as days and nights descended on my body”; on the part of the second mother: “My neighbors watched as I started to thrash on the ground, tearing at my hair, my clothes”; “I rode a wheelchair to the funeral”]. While indeed the first mother is privileged to fly to “Canada, where no one really knows about me and my son,” the second mother from the fringes is resigned to living in an environment of impunity, where violence and killings continue. Read separately, this story of two mothers showed contrasting apprehensions to similar contexts of loss. However, since we have argued that they are connected, the juxtaposition may be properly recognized by considering the higher intelligence or consciousness that put together these stories in the first place.

As human beings, our perception is as limited as our experiences, and literature, Fiction most especially, provides us ways of approaching the vicarious and various possibilities of the human situation, no matter the distance or likelihood. To be human, we need to feel! The dead are not just numbers or unknown figures. They are human, no matter how the powerful portray their supposed inhumanity.

To evoke our empathy for the human figures of the story—as what points of view are meant to do—the narratives of the two mothers, said in the first person point of view, are framed by a larger consciousness—which in this occasion is what may be termed a silent, dissolved third person point of view, which orchestrates the discourse of the mothers, and seems to direct how the comparisons and connections are to be done in the reading of this short short story. The silence, in effect, lends voice to these figures silenced by society’s thirst for blood. This kind of point of view, in my reading, taps into both the third person limited and the objective narrator, to provide focus on the story’s plotting, and to render an almost documentary-like unfolding, where the mothers are made to appear to be giving an unadulterated account or interview. Points of view create these effects, as well as expand our perspectives, especially in these days where the spate of killings are being exonerated through shameless denials and the perpetration of alternative facts. As human beings, our perception is as limited as our experiences, and literature, Fiction most especially, provides us ways of approaching the vicarious and various possibilities of the human situation, no matter the distance or likelihood. To be human, we need to feel! The dead are not just numbers or unknown figures. They are human, no matter how the powerful portray their supposed inhumanity. Closely observing points of view in action as a fictional element allows us to witness imagined situations [which sometimes mine real-life experiences], study action [as provided by the story’s perspective], and wonder what these say about the human impulse. Etymologically, the term perspective, which we usually associate with art as a technique of creating an illusion of three dimensions, depth and space in a flat surface, figuratively means “a mental outlook.” As they say, ars longa, vita brevis, life is short, and art, Fiction in this case, is eternal, not only because it composes life meaningfully, but also shapes it using outlooks. We may not have our entire lives to broaden our horizons, but if contemplated upon, this is what points of view offer us. It even suffices in granting us the experience of being co-opted into the narratives, as in instances of stories utilizing what is problematically called “second person point of view,” which, as can be seen is not included in my list of concepts. You (and now I am addressing you, dear students) must be surprised—why problematically? I say this, because, a main requirement for a point of view is that it is able to frame the story, and consequently, articulate an outlook. This “second person point of view”, as commonly defined, is a narration that addresses a “you”, the reader actually, who is made to participate in the unfolding of the story. No issues with the narrator, really, but the problem lies with the you, this second person. The “you,” however, is silent, and quite passive, as the narrator—usually a first person, sometimes, an oracular or prophetic voice addressing a general audience—dictates particular actions or motivations for him/her. The “you” is used as a device for whatever effect the story intends. As part of the fictional ploy and suspension of disbelief, readers allow themselves to be co-opted by the storyteller, and this probably convinced some teachers of fiction that indeed, participation is also a form of outlook giving. However, I am more inclined to call this a narrative addressee, and readers, in that moment of reading the text, assume the consciousness of the addressee as characterized by the narrator. In our third and final story, “Conversation” by Darryl Delgado, we encounter this experience of being the addressee of a narrator enjoying a drunken stupor with her spouse along Matahimik Street. I like the fact that the story is titled “Conversation” and it takes place along the said road. The title and the setting evoke a very interesting tension, one that encapsulates the noise and silences between the characters of the story. This conversation ensues with the wife directing the narrative, and the husband, the you, performing the ordained actions or dialogue. The husband, the you, while he is made to respond in certain parts, becomes the figure whose presence in her life stirs the wife to ruminate on their life together. In the randomness and incoherence of their conversation—which makes sense because of the couple’s togetherness—the main narrator muses on what they both do (both write and teach), their marriage, and their life together: “It makes me think: Surely the swaying moon, smug with the knowledge of melting, knows about this, this death of ice. I don’t know why I think that thought though. I don’t know now why I had thought it would be a good idea to get drunk—and not just drink, but get drunk—with you tonight. I don’t know why we got married. I thought we had agreed to be married to ourselves, and date each other on the side. I thought we would travel the world, help the poor, write novels. I don’t know why we both ended up as teachers. I don’t know why I am starting to hate hearing, listening to, pronouncing words.” There’s is not much conflict manifesting in this compact story, but if one believes that conflict is also a tussle within the self, we may say that the wife, in that moment, found an opportunity to consider her life, and her life with this man who is her equal, even in getting drunk. It’s a subdued tussle meant to yield for her some kind of illumination in the present [the story is narrated in the present tense, take note] as she speculates about their future. As she went to “stop at the nearest lamppost” to lean and puke, she realizes how the constant presence of this man reaching her, “breathing short, heavy breaths” [because she ran from him] is comforting enough to last her a lifetime: “Your face is red. Your eyes alive like they have never been before. You seem to me magnified by some strange force.” Her illumination is projected not only by the street lamp, but also by the 7-11 at which she gazes after puking: “The brightness of the store softly illuminates the entire block.” The illumination wandered off again, this time, associating itself with a story of Estrella Alfon, and their not having any children. Now, if this is indeed a conversation between wife and husband, is it also safe to say that at large, the husband figure and the you, were both utilized by the wife as some sort of a sounding board for her own self-dialogue? In the end, is she really talking to her husband, or is he talking to herself? The answer to both is yes, which explains the art in this use of address. Essentially, the story is told in the first person point of view, but uses a stand in, the narrative addressee, in order to reflect and deflect the drunken conversation, which embodies the nature of love and marriage, in the first place. Relationships are coherent and incoherent, sane and mad, focused and aimless. Relationships are paradoxes, they are disjunctions that make sense, where individuals with various similarities and differences coalesce in what the great poet Shakespeare once called “the marriage of true minds.” The contradictions usually dissolve and even the dialogue “I wass stalking about Siberia, I mean talkings abouts Siberia…” becomes a warm reassurance as the world spins wildly in one’s drunkenness and doubt. The only guarantee of the relationship is indeed the moment one shares with the beloved, even if, as in the story, both are “swaying”, and “the ground under (their) feet is heaving like a tentative wave.”  Resonating with the first person narrator of this story is made possible through a keen sense of understanding the  dynamics between the wife-narrator and her husband-narrative addressee-you. As the two hold hands at the end of the story, the you, us readers, are also made to reexamine our perceptions about relationships and commitments. After all, a relationship is not all about the romantic search for forever. It is, as the final story tells us, about the shared graces and illumination of the now.