The Newcomer Wins in Ruins

Narratives are never innocent. They are crafted artifacts, spun out of fragments of observation and stitched into coherence not because the world demands it, but because the narrator does. Unless a tale is sheer fiction, there is always an initial spark — a gesture, an overheard sentence, the sight of a raised glass — that becomes the seed of a story. The story is what the narrator does with the spark, how the flame is coaxed into a particular shape, how it is bent to illuminate one figure while leaving another in shadow. It is rarely the event itself that dictates the story, nor the person who is the object of the tale. The purpose lies in the needs of the narrator: to defend, to accuse, to justify, to protect, to erase. And when told with enough conviction, these spun tales do not merely sit alongside reality — they replace it. They become the received truth, repeated until the event itself is buried beneath layers of narration. The 1996 film Courage Under Fire understood this well. Denzel Washington’s character wanders through a fog of conflicting accounts of one Gulf War skirmish, each soldier telling the same event differently — heroism, cowardice, chaos, order. Each retelling recasts the participants until the truth becomes impossible to retrieve. Think of the ordinary example: someone seen with a few drinks in hand. One narrator will describe them as sociable, another as careless, and yet another — perhaps needing to prove a point — will name them a drunk. The observation is the same, but the story is not. Or think of the subtle betrayals of intimacy, the kind I wrote about in Sweet Little Lies. To erase an older friend and secure the permanence of a new one requires narrative work. The stories must be spun to cast the older connection as irrelevant, even burdensome. The alterations may be little, but the effect is monumental, for in time the narration becomes the reality that others believe. And yet there is another layer: the anguish of the one whose story is rewritten to make room for another. To be narrated out is not to vanish in silence; it is to watch oneself appear in a distorted mirror held up by someone else’s voice. Suddenly, the gestures once offered in care are described as obligations, the companionship once treasured is recast as burden, and the presence once cherished is narrated as annoyance. This is the cruelty of narrative replacement. The older story is not merely forgotten; it is reshaped to suit the needs of the new script. The new person, eager to claim center stage, is written into the role of rescuer, confidant, essential companion. The previous figure is shifted to the margins, their contributions retold as trivial, their very presence rewritten as an impediment. The displaced one remembers the late-night phone calls, the hurried errands, the whispered reassurances — all the tiny acts that once formed the architecture of trust. These cannot be undone in lived memory, yet they are undone in narration, and that is enough to unseat them in the social imagination. The one who has been narrated out is left with the unbearable knowledge that their story remains intact within them, but invisible to others. This is not just the silence of being forgotten; it is the perversion of being rewritten. Walter Fisher reminded us that stories persuade not because they are empirically true, but because they seem coherent and resonate with shared values. The story of the new person works because it fits the teller’s need and satisfies the audience’s hunger for novelty. My own notion of narrative bits takes us further: our lives are constantly reduced to fragments, which can be assembled and reassembled in infinite ways. The fragments that once belonged to the displaced friend are now recycled to create a different composite, one in which their presence is barely visible. Thus, the displaced live with a double wound: the loss of the relationship itself, and the distortion of the memory of that relationship, knowing all the while that the fragments of their life are still circulating — only now, in someone else’s story. But the narrated out can always turn to Dylan in his song where he reminds, “Blowing through the dust upon our shelves/We're idiots, babe/It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves”