The Inaccessible Inner Life of Wakefield Essay - 849 Words

The Inaccessible Inner Life of â€Å"Wakefield† â€Å"All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting looking out upon, See, hear, and am silent.† –Walt Whitman We are presented with a piece of gossip of a man named Wakefield who leaves his wife for twenty years to live in a house the next street over. If this story were workshopped in a present-day fiction writing class, it would be argued that this story has interesting elements but is not, as a whole, an interesting story-- that the story lies within Wakefield’s motivation for leaving or within the reaction of Wakefield’s wife upon the return of her presumed-dead husband, or that the point of view ought to be reconsidered in order to tell the full story. Much of†¦show more content†¦The narrator utilizes the collective first person in order to draw the reader closer to his story, addressing his audiences with phrases such as â€Å"Let us imagine,† as though we can somehow know the narrator in viewing another’s story through the narrator’s mind. The reader ideally feels as though he is one with the narrator in the way that all men are communal ly â€Å"one† together. The very act of the narrator’s writing his own thoughts on the event into a story, however, distances the reader, as we still now read the personal projections of another human being, one who, too, who cannot be known. â€Å"We know, each for himself, that none of us would perpetrate such a folly, yet feel as if some others might,† says the narrator, bonding his audience together against the questionable act of Wakefield. But what makes us so different from a man about whom we know so little? We know as much about Wakefield as we know about the narrator, and if we are one with the narrator, we are, naturally, one with Wakefield himself. And so we remain, each one of us, Outcasts of the Universe ourselves. â€Å"Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one