We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves Analysis

For a text to be valuable, the only thing it must do is evoke strong and withstanding emotion within the reader. For an emotion to be strong enough to meet this criteria, it must change a person’s state of being or perspective, which occur most heavily in plot reveals, the structure of the narrative, and emotional scenes. Texts succeed to fulfil this criteria in varying amounts, with the poem La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats failing to evoke strong emotion within the reader as it tells the story of a knight who falls in love with a faery. We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler meets this criteria perfectly, in its telling of Rosemary’s unconventional life from early childhood to college in an unconventional storytelling

Chronological narrative structure (that of La Belle Dame Sans Merci), whilst a classic and easy to read structure, lacks the extra dimension possessed by those with a non-linear narrative structure (that of We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves). In La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the chronological narrative does not necessarily restrict the narrative, but it also does not add anything to it. In the lines “They cried- ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!’” the narrative is at an obvious climax, seen in the reveal of the Belle Dame’s evil intensions. Because of the narrative structure, the reader knows that the story is coming to a close and they know essentially the whole plot, therefore develop the feeling of closing from the book quite early. However, in We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves features a non-linear timeline, first introduced in the lines, “Skip the beginning. Start in the middle.” This concept is present throughout the entire book- it is mainly about the happenings in the “middle”, with frequent flashbacks to the “end of the beginning”, but is told from the “end of the end” therefore references the end, with the “beginning of the beginning” and the “beginning of the end” at the end of the book. This unusual timeline means that readers do know which section of the story they are getting next, therefore has a stronger sense of excitement and mystery, emotions which are passed onto the reader. The further intrigue that is found in We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves, which is lacking in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, is one of the things that makes it a better read, and a more valuable