The Narrative Killing

I have spent my life dealing with narratives. Indeed, once, my notion of narrative bits (narbs) took on global prominence. And thus, I believe, people are made of stories. This is not a poetic indulgence but the fundamental reality of how human beings exist in the world, for every person carries within them a woven text of memories, gestures, and acts, each one forming part of an unfinished manuscript that is constantly revised. To meet another person is not to meet a body or a face, it is to allow one’s stories to brush against theirs, to test whether their archive might rhyme with your own, to sense whether a shared narrative could be written together. And yet, contrary to the gentle myth of “growing apart,” these stories do not weaken simply because time passes, nor do they fade like ink abandoned to the elements. They remain stubbornly alive in memory, ready to be recalled, ready to be retold, waiting for the occasion when the silence is broken and the old convergence can be heard again. What silences them is not the passage of time but the violence of displacement. A new person arrives, bearing new stories that sparkle with novelty, and to make space for them the older stories are not merely set aside but actively forced out, rewritten downward so that the new illusion of convergence can be sustained. This illusion is seductive. The fresh arrival seems to carry tales that rhyme with yours, their metaphors familiar, their cadences echoing your own. But this is rarely the deep convergence that years of shared experience bring. It is instead the mirroring of enthusiasm, the performance of resonance, the shimmer of novelty mistaken for inevitability. Zygmunt Bauman, writing about the condition of liquid modernity, reminded us that contemporary relationships are organized around disposability, around the pursuit of immediacy, around the restless desire for stories that can gratify in the present without the burden of old commitments. In such a world, the illusion of convergence is powerful, for it allows one to believe that a new alignment has been discovered, while disguising the displacement required to grant it legitimacy. To sustain the belief that the new friendship is natural, even fated, the older story must be denied coherence. The cruelty lies not simply in the abandonment of presence but in the recasting of the past. The gestures that once served as proof of intimacy—the midnight phone call when words were not necessary, the quiet vigil in a hospital waiting room waiting to provide medical care for a person – only because it is another human being and important to a friend, the patient reading of a draft before submission—are rewritten in retrospect as trivial. What was once indispensable is re-narrated as accidental. The story that once explained closeness must now explain distance, and so it becomes: “We were never truly aligned,” or “It was never that deep,” or “It simply ran its course.” Habermas taught us that human beings cannot live without narrative coherence, that contradictions must be resolved if the self is to remain intact. And so coherence is purchased at the cost of rewriting memory: the old story is not allowed to remain important, for that would destabilize the new. Literature and drama give us mirrors for this process. Gatsby rewrote Daisy into his dream not by honoring her present but by erasing it, forcing her marriage and her reality into silence so that his story could hold. Othello was persuaded to overwrite his love for Desdemona with a story of betrayal engineered by Iago. In both cases, the violence was not in forgetting but in replacement: the necessity to sustain one story required the destruction of another. Everyday life is less theatrical, but no less cruel. The displaced friend is not merely left behind; they are rewritten as unnecessary, as a burden, their earlier role reduced to a cameo. The phrase “we drifted apart” functions as a kind of narrative anesthesia, masking the wound of replacement with the comfort of inevitability. Yet memory resists this rewriting. Like a palimpsest, the traces of the old story remain faint but indelible, reemerging at unexpected times. A small bottle of wine, a conversation at Grand, a familiar song carries the echo of the earlier convergence, reminding the displaced friend that it was once real, that it cannot be wholly denied. And it is precisely this persistence that makes displacement so painful. The one who is written out knows that the story has not died a natural death but has been actively denied, its vitality suppressed to make space for the illusion of the new. It is one thing to be forgotten, it is another to be rewritten as irrelevant. Cultures have long attempted to resist this violence by embedding friendships into ritual. The Rakhi festival in India ties siblings and friends into bonds that demand recognition, making displacement socially costly. Aristotle himself, in the Nicomachean Ethics, distinguished between friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue, already acknowledging that some stories were fragile while others were more enduring. Medieval Europe bound friendships with oaths of chivalry, Romanticism dramatized their betrayal in poetry and novels, and modernity attempts to preserve them through photographs, social media archives, digital traces. Each of these practices recognizes the fragility of narrative space and the temptation to overwrite, even as they try to guard against it. But no ritual, however sacred, can fully prevent the arrival of the new story that insists on primacy. To think of friendship as a negotiation for narrative space is to understand its fragility. The self is finite; one cannot endlessly sustain convergences with every story that arrives. To grant one narrative prominence requires forcing another to the margins. The metaphor of stagecraft applies here: the stage cannot hold all characters at once. Some must exit to allow others to enter. But in life, unlike theatre, the exit is not acknowledged honestly. It is retroactively justified. The friend is written out of the play as though they were never central to the plot, their lines erased in the final edit. And yet the audience remembers, the actors remember, the script remembers. Life is no clean stage; its edits always leave behind traces of the overwritten. Still, the persistence of memory allows for hope. If friendships are made of stories, then they can be rewritten, not only to erase but also to restore. A displaced friend can be reintroduced, a story once denied can be retold. The return is never simple, never identical to the past; it will be a sequel rather than a continuation. But even sequels can honor the original text, acknowledging its scars while giving it new life. What matters is whether both parties are willing to recognize the traces that remain and allow them to thicken once again into living narrative. The ethics of friendship, then, is the ethics of narrative care. To know that stories do not weaken on their own, but are forced out to sustain the illusion of new convergence, is to resist the temptation of easy phrases like “we drifted apart.” It is to admit the violence of replacement and to honor what was lost by naming it honestly. Such honesty does not prevent displacement; life will always demand reorganization of narrative space. But it changes how we remember. It allows us to say: you were forced aside, your story was denied coherence, but it was real, and it remains within me. To live among people is to carry the weight of unfinished stories, to know that new arrivals will always pressure the archive, but also to resist erasure by keeping faith with the truth of what once converged. It is exactly what Paul Simon said in his song for the narrative, and person, written away “You just slip out the back, Jack/Make a new plan, Stan.”