Sports are considered very important for children’s development, and rightly so. Participating in such activities promotes healthy competition and a better understanding of one’s self. It also, supposedly, promotes teamwork. But there is a problem there, which I will refer to as the fallacy of teamwork: playing together and playing as a team are two very different aspects. Confusing them can lead to serious consequences in terms of parent-child relationship. It can also have negative consequences for a child’s development.
As I have mentioned before, experiencing is an integral part of being an author. You must see the world around you before you write. And so, I have learned to pay attention to seemingly unimportant events around me. Let me tell you two little stories that are related to today’s topic, the fallacy of teamwork.
Playing together and playing as a team are two vastly different concepts
They say that all good things must come to an end. I don’t believe in endings, as I don’t believe in beginnings. Blame my academic background, but I prefer to focus on duration and temporal chunks. Having said that, a novel has to end in some way, because there is a physical limit to how many pages you can put out there. But are narrative endings and physical endings one and the same? (Sneak preview: no)
In today’s post I’ll share with you an important secret about narrative endings: if you do things right, there’s one and only one ending that suits your book of fiction. I’ll give you the details below, but basically it goes like this: if you can’t pick that one ending, whether because it feels wrong or because you can’t find it, it means your structure is wrong. This might sound awful, but see the flip side of it: if your ending feels right, it usually means the entire narrative preceding it is also right.
There can be many narrative endings, but only one of them is ideal(more…)
Note: the following article on fate and chance in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a modified excerpt (pp. 83-84) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.
Fate and Chance as Dichotomies of Timing
In several Gothic works, fate and chance (and particularly their dynamic balance) are often the main force driving the plot forward. As Frankenstein exemplifies, characters often fall prey to their fate as a result of frustratingly well-timed occurrences.
As the character of Walton mentions in his letter to his sister, his plans would have failed if he had not inherited a fortune “just at [the] time” of a failed previous endeavor (Shelley 14).
At the beginning of his narration, Victor Frankenstein mentions how “a variety of circumstances” did not allow his father to marry early (Ibid 26). This is only the beginning, as Victor himself soon falls victim to the machinations of time. Just as he is about to leave Ingolstadt and return to his hometown, “an incident happened that protracted [his] stay” (Ibid 40). Later on, Victor sees his plans falling apart again. As he plans to return to Geneva, he is “delayed by several accidents” (Ibid 55).
These instances of tragic irony are what I define as dichotomies of timing. Essentially, the plot splits into two different directions: the thetical one that is the actual outcome leading to the events described in the story, and the antithetical one that is its opposite. Such a reading poses a question: Had Victor escaped these events, would the ensuing catastrophe have happened? Is fate avoidable?
Are choices based on fate or chance? Destiny or coincidence?
