Coherence and Closure

Smith and Watson encourage readers to look for gaps in coherence in life narratives. These gaps indicate possible revelations or struggles on the author’s part and change how we experience their stories. The digressions or breaks also suggest that the author has multiple, conflicting voices which in turn, present a complex voice to readers.Closure, for some reason, is lumped in with the concept of coherence. Because no writer can extend their autobiography beyond the point of his or her death, s/he must find a suitable point to end his or her narrative. When reading life narratives, it is necessary to consider why the author has chosen to end their story at the point that it has ended-- does it feel finished? Open ended? What is the significance of the ending?

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a good example of both coherence and closure. I'd like to address each topic separately. While Rankine's novel is primarily prose, it has moments of poetry and bits of surreal conversation that seem suspended in space somewhere. Each time she inserts these breaks in her prose, it reinforces what she is talking about in the previous paragraph. Visually, her line breaks and inclusion of pictures of television sets between chapters show digressions and transitions that surprisingly contribute to the overall flow of the book by breaking up the chunks of prose. The end of Rankine's book really isn't about her and thus it's not a permanent closure of her life story. Rather, it's about the nature of being present, and how an individual isn't "here" unless there is another individual to recognize his/her existence. In this sense, we are alone and it's something we all have in common, which actually means that none of us are truly, 100% alone.

Personal Take:

I really enjoyed writing a blog post about this book for that week of class. Furthermore, I thought the ending of Rankine's book was phenomenal and I was happy that we got a chance to discuss it in class. The last two pages conveyed Rankine's sense of community and relationships in both a broad and specific way. In doing so, she is appealing to humanity without being too vague. I love that she quoted Paul Celan as saying "I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem," and then follows it with her understanding of that idea. We also discussed in class her decision to end with a preposition, making the last line kind of open ended and subject to interpretation. In a strange twist, it almost felt more personal that way, like she's letting the reader decide what it means after giving us all the tools to figure it out. "We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of." 

- Mary Alice Miller