Writing Sample Linkedin
- 1. Connor Katelyn Connor NMED Giving and Receiving Accounts of the Self One Minus One: Formulating Emptiness Colm Toibin’s moving story “One Minus One” is a beautiful illustration of a dissociated event becoming significant through writing. Donnel Stern’s insightful article “Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis” concisely explains the complex psychological processes that are at work in Toibin’s story about the death of his mother. For six years, the narrator was unable to express the traumatic experience of the death of his mother in language. It is only now through the co-construction of his experience of his mother’s death, that the narrator brings meaning and significance to the last real thing that happened to him. At the beginning of Stern’s article, he explains that consciousness is an exercise that must be actively put to work during life events. He argues against Freud’s notion that dissociation is an active intricacy at work in the mind, and claims instead that truly grasping the fullness of an experience and how it changed an individual requires conscious effort (86). To literally put the experience into words is a revelation of thoughts and feelings, and is a testament of who an individual is, and what the experiences mean in life (93). Toibin’s story is the first time that he begins to make meaning not only of his mother’s death, but also the absence of his father. Through expressing this grief, the narrator is transforming a traumatic and unspoken experience into a beautiful and creative testament of his past that he can finally move on from. “One Minus One” is narrated in the second person, which makes this story an intimate, co-constructed testimony right from the first line. He goes through every minute circumstance of the experience- from where he was when he first got the phone call about his mother’s failing
- 2. Connor2 health, all the way down to what his past lover wore- in order to place himself and his readers within the story. His emotions at this time seem blocked, similarly to how they were when the actual event happened. The numbness lasted for six years, and it is only now that he feels that he can express them (Toibin, 273). He must start off with a lucid connection to his mother through the metaphor of the moon, and from there he slowly takes himself out of the exact time and place of where he is in the present, and into his formerly dissociated experience. Through the small details of the stories and the detached numerical descriptions, the narrator begins to subtly reveal the dynamics of the relationship between himself and his family. He talks about the time when he first experienced loss in childhood with the absence of both his parents and eventual death of his father, and how the experience formed the way he viewed death and absence itself. He tells the interlocutor that in the months where his father was dying, his mother was absent and never made contact with him or his siblings. The effects of the abandonment become more relevant as the story progresses to when his mother leaves permanently. This distance he experienced with his parents sets up the precedent not only for the way he views his relationship with his family later on in life, but also how he describes the way the relationship with his mother formed itself. The disconnection the readers feel to the narrator is expressive of the relationship that he lost, as well as the loss of emotion and feeling he is struggling to express in the text. The point of this story from the narrator’s childhood is an example of how truth and imagination interact within the narration of a life event. In Stern’s article, he examines passages from Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” to express the ways in which a story does not necessarily have to be true to give the needed insight and emotion for the story. One poignant example from O’Brien’s work is when he talks about the differences between his life experiences
- 3. Connor3 in combat and the short stories he wrote about combat. Although he may not have actually killed someone in his lifetime, the narration of him killing a Vietnamese soldier shows the profound effects war can have on an individual, as well as the line between human moral and the call of duty (Stern, 94). Toibin also beautifully executes this lack of detail not necessarily in the fictionalization of any event, but in the vague and unformulated narration of his traumatic childhood experience of abandonment. The lack of memory begins to show readers an unreliability in the truthfulness of the narration of real-life events, but enriches the reading in a way that reveals a deeper side of the narrator’s understanding of his relationship with his mother. In a similar way, the narrator in Toibin’s short story could be expressing the loss of his father and abandonment of his mother in a fictional and vague experience. Many times, Irish fathers are lost to alcoholism or neglect. If this was the truth, rather than outwardly labeling the illness and placing the blame on his father, the narrator is able to simply express the way the months of absence affected his own views during childhood and beyond. Although the reader does not get the full story behind his mother’s absence and father’s death, it is not relevant to the purpose of the story. What is important to this section of the short story is how the readers better understand the narrator’s emotions and assumptions as he moves forward in the story, based on past experiences. As Stern explains, “a certain degree of subjectivism is inevitable for anyone who seeks meaning in life and not the mere sequence and conglomeration of events… because when it comes to the measurement of reliability and validity, meaning is uncooperative” (95). Whether or not the story being told is nonfiction is not as important as the meaning expressed within it. The vague section, which contrasts to the detailed descriptions of events, serves as a glimpse into the culture of the narrator and the way expressing emotion is valued within his family.
- 4. Connor4 At this point in the story, the narrator begins to show his emotions in a passive, yet extremely effective way. Rather than saying outright that he was feeling an overwhelming sense of loss, he simply says “this should be nothing, because it resembled nothing, just as one minus one resembles zero,” (Toibin, 280). It is here that he is the closest he has ever been, as Stern expresses it, “speaking from the heart” (99) to a person who once knew him well enough to hear and understand those emotions. It becomes clear that the way the narrator was taught to deal with emotions was to push them away, so his vocabulary and range of expression is limited at this point in the story. Stern explains in his article that this difficulty in articulation is not uncommon. He explains “to communicate about a matter of substance is liable to be difficult… because, after all, the thought hasn’t been spoken before,” (101). The narrator clearly struggles with explaining his feelings on such a personal level. This is emphasized when it is finally time for him and his sister to decide on his mother’s last course of treatment. He sees the family as “a distant counsel” (Toibin, 281), and refers to his mother as “your mother” (282) with his sister. Both of these examples bring a dark humor that allows the narrator to distance himself with the reality of his mother’s grave situation. This again could be seen as a consequence of culture, because his sister participates in the jokes, and his brother is seen as completely absent from the strong emotions he is so tied to. His brother was always the favorite of his mother, but when it came time for her to go, he left for Dublin in order to escape the emotions that were coming so close to surfacing. The most truthful moment of Toibin’s short story comes when the narrator is finally beginning to realize why he has to come back to Ireland, and who it is that he must say goodbye to. He honestly speaks from the heart when he directly talks about his emotions, and begins to understand the ways he is permanently tied to these feelings. He says, “I could feel that this
- 5. Connor5 going home to my mother’s bedside would not be simple, that some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage,” (281-282). Although he does not go into detail about which parts of his mother he is attached to and detached from, the expression of pain and loss is creative, beautiful, and comes to be a way for the narrator to better understand his time with his mother as valued, but strained. As the narrator is getting close to the heart of his pain and loss, he begins to let language take hold of him and the words seem to come out unplanned in an almost ethereal way. It is here that the narrator sees the “recognition of the power of expression we can have in language, but only if we give ourselves over to it and do not force meanings, allowing them to arise within it,” (Stern, 93). Rather than staying close to the actual events and trying to control the emotions that arise, the narrator can release himself through writing from the hold that the event keeps him, and can allow meaning to arise organically out of his grief. No longer is he trapped by this overwhelming and traumatic event; he can now find the time to grieve and truly let go. At the end of the piece, the narrator says that he can now find relief in his grief, because it means that the moment has passed. He can move on to a place where his past relationships and familial tensions no longer consume him. Because he has been able to finally express the way the event affected him, he can allow other things to happen to him (282). Although much is still left unsaid about the state of his relationship with his brother, sister, and interlocutor, the narrator created a meaningful representation of his loss through words that he was not able to do before. Due to language, time, and distance, the narrator can release the boundaries that kept him away from his emotions for the six years between when the last real thing happened to him, to when he can finally express why.
- 6. Connor6 Works Cited Stern, Donnel. “Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis.” Reconsidering Self-Deception. 1997. 85-111. Print. Toibin, Colm. “One Minus One.” Mothers and Sons. New York: Scribner. 2007. 273-288. Print.