From the Desk of the Literary Coroner

From the Desk of Literary Coroner:

Today’s Intake

On my desk arrived an intriguing manuscript titled The Five Stages of Damnation — Quinque Gradūs Damnatiōnis.

It comes with a label that reads: “Object is a hybrid narrative with grief architecture.”

Identification of Components

This object’s narrative comprises the following key components:

– Unstable narrative point of view

– Deliberate mutation of genres

– Intrusive interjections from a separate editorial voice

– Latin used to distance and disconnect

– Emotional firewall in the form of status logs

Narrative Stress Testing

In order to determine how effective the narrative is at functioning on a more craft-forward plane, stress testing is required.

Early on, a dragon is featured as a smokescreen and metaphorical device to shield the narrator from his own mind’s desire to work through grief.

If the dragon is removed, what happens to the narrative architecture?

Despite the dragon’s spurious nature, the smokescreen it provides is necessary for showing how grief works in stories.

There are sparse references to the narrator’s mother. This would lead one to believe that was the true goal of this tale. The mother’s death or disappearance is responsible for the narrator’s need to covertly dissect his grief through this story.

What would happen if the mother were removed?

It is likely the narrative would lose its emotional backbone, despite how few times the mother is mentioned.

What would happen if Latin were removed? As a classic attempt to use distancing yet poetic language, the narrator employs Latin terminology to discuss the five common stages of grief.

If the Latin were removed, the story would fall flat as a suitable entry for the Craft Over Catharsis challenge for which it was submitted.

The grief stages would be more plainly stated, eliminating the heavy work the Latin performs in showing a mind unable to fully contemplate the impact of grief.

What if the fairground were removed? Would that impact the effectiveness and bite of the narrative?

It’s possible the structure would not hold, and grief as the catalyst for the story would become more directly understood rather than demonstrating the degree of disarray a grieving mind can go through.

The findings of the stress testing indicate that emotions are not the load-bearing structure of this narrative.

Narrative Structural Conclusion (You may want to take notes.)

It can be concluded that once you examine the full narrative, it is clear that emotions have been removed successfully. Rather than weakening the payoff, it is my objective but qualified opinion that emotions are not the core engine. It was an exercise in providing a working example of how grief is understood in narratives.

The unique and at times jarring mutation of genres could be too easily written off as “clever for clever’s sake.” However, in this case, it is a highly effective way of guiding the reader to appreciate the story being told. In a full-circle sense, the backbone is the processing of grief through the content, framed in such a manner that the form allows the emotion to be seen and understood far more deeply than if direct language or a traditional catharsis-driven narrative structure were used.

Craft, in this case, precedes catharsis.

Failure Mode Report

To help examine how grief is understood in stories, this narrative dismantles and crumbles until it collapses into total unstructured abstraction.

Toxicology Report

As has been noted in this autopsy, there are a number of stories circulating that the removal of emotion is represented by poisons and sickness.

• Latin over English
• No explicit discussion about mother’s death
• No explanation about the dragon or fairground
• The whole layout with staccato brevity reads wrong.

Cause of Death

The narrative eventually dies when the narrator is no longer hiding from his grief. Stripped of metaphor and Latin, laid bare is his grief and the impact it has had on his life.

Next of Kin

The narrator's wife and children are the sole beneficiaries of the author’s estate. They have been informed and will be kept abreast of anything else of note.

Glossary of Terms

Craft - noun - experience and skill combined to make objects; an activity or job requiring experience and skill or something produced using experience and skill.

Catharsis - noun - process involving the release of strong emotions through a specific experience or activity, theatre or writing, for example. Anything that helps you understand the emotions.

Grief architecture – noun – grief as a framework for the structural design of a narrative.

Mutation of genres – noun – the deliberate blending or shifting of different styles of literary writing to produce an unconventional narrative.

Load-bearing structure - metaphor - the main figurative or literal structural element supporting the effectiveness of a narrative.

Status logs – noun – meta-comments or records that function within the narrative as either a framework or barrier, deliberately distancing the emotional content from the reader.

Five Stages of Grief – often discussed as the DABDA or Kübler-Ross model, first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, in her book On Death and Dying (1969). The five main stages of grief are:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

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