Instead of beggining his homework due the next morning, he instead decided to sit himself down on the computer chair and browse around the Internet. After having listened to a book on tape for a couple hours, the narrator’s voice was fresh in his mind but lacking anything to narrate, so our hero’s brain substituted his own life story in the plot.
He came around to visiting the Straight Dope Message Boards and decided to create a thread about narrating one’s own life in one’s head when he had another one of his frequent brilliant strokes of genius. He would write the entire post in such a fashion as to directly show the method in which he engaged in this egocentric storytelling. He began his post, and soon realized that the heater which doesn’t turn off was generating an uncomfortable amount of heat, so he lifted his body out of the chair, went to open the window, and returned to his post, where he saw a nice opportunity to begin a new paragraph, as the current paragraph was getting rather long.
Suddenly thinking back to the many other obligations he had to complete that night, he started to wrap up his post so he could get around to the question that he had originally planned on asking, which was after all why he placed it in IMHO rather than MPSIMS, mundane and pointless as the topic was.
“Curses!” he thought, reviewing his recently posted message, “this is why I only got second place in that spelling bee in middle school…”, noticing that he had spelled the word “beginning” as “beggining”. Not wanting to go back on his orthographic choice, as that would show weakness and ignorance, he instead directed his fellow Dopers to http://www.freespeling.com so there would seemingly be a purpose to the misspelling, even thought it was just a matter of unawareness.
“Curses!” he thought, reviewing his recently posted message, “this is why I only got second place in that spelling bee in middle school…”, noticing that he had spelled the word “beginning” as “beggining”. Not wanting to go back on his orthographic choice, as that would show weakness and ignorance, he instead directed his fellow Dopers to http://www.freespeling.com so there would seemingly be a purpose to the misspelling, even though it was just a matter of unawareness.
No, but it reminds me of when Family Guy’s Peter Griffin narrated his life.
“I walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. I looked with a grimace at the questionable meal Lois had placed in front of me. Of course I’d never tell her how disgusted I was with her cooking, but somehow I think she knew. Lois had always been full of energy and life, but lately I had begun to grow more aware of her aging. The bright, exuberant eyes that I had fallen in love with were now beginning to grow dull and listless with the long fatigue of a weary life. [Lois knocks Peter unconscious.] I woke several hours later in a daze.”
Yes. She does it all the time. Narrating her life gives her necessary distance from events which could otherwise seem overwhelming. Life’s little disasters are put into perspective when automatically translated into amusing anecdotes, sometimes concealing those little nuggets of truth and perception which help to signify the work of a master story-teller. She rationalises her decisions with the knowledge that they are all part of the “rounding out” of her character which is so fundamental to the plot. The plot itself is of course a cliff-hanger, and she resists the urge to read ahead to find out what happens next.
She stretches and yawns, and contemplates another cup of coffee, while reflecting that her friends often accuse her of being detached. She wonders why.