Life in the Denouement

The most important things I’ve ever learned in life came from my high school English class. English class was to me the part of the day a teacher could really talk to you. A period when you weren’t treated like some computer chip charged with the task of holding a set of useless numbers and symbols. It was a period of the day when a beautifully poetic, older, vaguely socialist version of yourself prods you to think about the vast extent of humanity for 45 minutes a day. Now, if the aim of school is to make you ready for the workforce I acknowledge English class didn’t give me practical knowledge to that end, but let’s be honest here, if I really intended to have a real job I wouldn’t be writing a blog right now. What English class did teach me was how to think, how to think too much at times, but it taught me how to think nonetheless. It taught me how to express my innermost thoughts. It taught me how to break down on a piece of paper and form the shards of a broken heart into a sort of mosaic. It taught me to love people who stand against everything I believe in. But perhaps one of the most important things I think English class taught me was the standard story arc chart.
It’s a symbol I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with, considering it’s been crammed down each and every one of our throats at some point by a teacher trying to help us understand literature. It resembles a checkmark flipped upside down. It starts on one end with the exposition, the description of the characters and setting. From there it slides into the rising action when the events of the story and the conflict build and build up until the story reaches the climax, the moment that the writer’s own world cannot take the tension anymore and collapses into the denouement, when the events settle back down to the solid ground of the conclusion.
This basic outline pervades every piece of writing ever created. Almost every story relies on this concept of small events building and building until the universe breaks and crumbles into the conclusion. I’ll use It’s a Wonderful Life as an example, as I always do. The story introduces George Bailey to us and shows his life as the tension between his dreams and reality build and build until it reaches crisis levels when an angel comes from out of nowhere to show him the error of his ways. From there it shows the events falling back down into the conclusion as the town rallies to save George. This arc is in every story we tell. It’s even in the songs we sing. Songs build through the first two verses and choruses, leading to the ultimate climax of the bridge, and back down to the chorus and the outro. We find this pattern in music, poetry, literature, movies, theatre, video games and even sex. All our greatest works follow this idea that life is just building up to some climatic revolution that will overthrow all of the problems in the world. It seems only natural to all of us that real life should hold to the same pattern. We cling to this idea that these tribulations are just a build up leading to the moment when all of our problems explode in front of our eyes and point to our final salvation. We have no clue how to live outside of this pattern.
Maybe we’re fools for thinking of life by these terms that we’ve created. Maybe life isn’t such an ordered thing. Maybe the simple truth is that our problems may never lead to a final climax. Maybe we’re meant to spend life sleeping on pins and needles so the coffin is the most comfortable bed we ever can find. Maybe we’re sitting here waiting for a revolution that will never come.
And even if this archetype is real, how are we to know what part of the story we’re at. Are we rising or falling? To me, it’s more comforting to think of this as rising action. That today there is conflict, but somewhere just beyond the sunset salvation is waiting for me. That someday soon a climax will come that’s so gorgeous it will blind us all. My greatest fear though is that maybe all the conflicts in my life are gone. Maybe this is the bed I will sleep in for all eternity. Maybe life has boxed me away in a storage unit and has stopped me from ever finding a true resolution. It’s told me to settle down. To live life in the denouement. Could it be that I’ve made too drastic a turning point already and found myself eternally separated from the promised land.
For now I can only hold on to the idea that maybe our concept of a story is so much smaller than what humanity really is. The truth is we look at life as if they’re one long battle, but the truth is we have a thousand battles to fight. We will have a thousand victories. A thousand defeats. A thousand broken hearts. We’ll have a thousand steam engines to race against. While we fear being trapped in a denouement, we never can be. Life is always rising and falling at the same time. One conflict building onto another, there’s always a war to fight. Easy sleep may be a dream that only comes with blindness. If we keep our eyes open, there always is a war we’re trapped inside. All of us were born with hammers in our hands, and until we die, they’re going to stay there.