An Impersonal and Intrapersonal Encounter

As the story’s third-person narrator introduces the AR and the VP, it is their similarities that are highlighted. It is night, well past ten o’clock, and each man finds himself at the tired and tie-loosened end of another workday. As “young for an executive” and “newly divorced,” the AR seems to stand in contrast with the seasoned VP, who has been “married for almost thirty years” (pp. 45–6). But the narrator also reports that “there were between these last two executives to leave the Building the sorts of similarities enjoyed by parallel lines” (p. 45). The men work at opposite ends of different floors, and as they walk to the “open-mouthed” elevators that will bear them down parallel shafts into the Building’s substructure, they carry identical briefcases, move through similar spaces, feel the same “special subsonic disquiet,” and receive a similar “intuition of the askew” (p. 45). They work for the same company, but they know each other “only slightly, and only by sight” (p. 47). Later, we learn that they also “shared pain, though of course neither knew” (p. 48).^{Footnote 2} Spatially and experientially, these men mirror each other.

That mirroring continues in relationship to their impersonality. Like the separate elevators that deliver them to opposite ends of the underground parking garage, these executives are at different ends of their anonymous careers. Referenced only by their job titles, neither man is ever named. As “the Account Representative,” it is as if the AR were no more than a nameless stand-in for one of his firm’s vital functions. As undistinguished as a respirator, he keeps cash flowing through the corporate body. Similarly, the VP’s full title—“Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production”—suggests his own estrangement from his product, whatever it might be (p. 45). As the two enter “the Executive Garage”—“the Building’s deepest plane” that “seemed very distant from everything else”—the setting itself alludes to the compression that each man suffers: “The empty Executive Garage was enormous, broad, long, its ceiling a claustrophobic eight-and-a-quarter feet, its (barely) overhead lights harshly yellow, its surfaces’ cement the tired color of much exhaust” (p. 46). In this space, the noises the men make produce only “echoes and echoes of echoes” (p. 46).

Furthermore, when considered alongside their different ranks within the company and their shared evening labors, the contrast between their bodies and modes of transportation suggests that the AR is on course to grow into a position like the VP’s—as a younger man staring into a mirror might imagine the older man that he will become. Whereas the AR is “spare, lithe” and has “about him an air of extreme economy,” the VP is a tall and large man, “broad and blunt, his back a slow-moving hull in Production’s daytime hallways” (pp. 46–7). Analogously, the AR drives a “clean-white motor scooter” that leans on its kickstand beside the VP’s “solid and equally clean broad Brougham of a car” (p. 47). As empty as the AR already is, all signs point to a more imposing vacuity that awaits him.

The AR’s impersonality is also apparent in his thoughts and manner as the VP approaches across the empty parking garage. The AR is anticipating “the obligation of conversation without the conversational prerequisites of intimacy or interests or concerns to share” (p. 48). By this point, we already know that the AR oscillates in his work between “smoothly capable” and “cold” (p. 46). He is also “most at ease with those he countenanced at a distance of several feet” (p. 46). Now, as the VP walks toward him, the AR composes “a carefully casual face” and chooses a greeting that, “neither dismissive nor inviting,” will contain “an acknowledgement of distance and an easy willingness to preserve same” (p. 48).

But something is amiss. The AR notices that the VP has stopped, grimaced, “dropped a noisily slender briefcase, and placed both hands over a vague concavity that seemed, a bit blurrily, to have appeared in the double-breasted front of his topcoat. He grabbed at himself as do those in pain” (p. 49). The Account Representative then watches as the VP “raked a raw clean streak in a cement pillar’s soot and clipped a WRONG WAY sign’s weighted concrete doughnut with a roundabout heel as he pirouetted, reached out at air, hunched, crumpled, and fell” (p. 49). Wrong way indeed—here is a warning that the AR might yet heed.

“Luckily the Account Representative knew CPR” (p. 49). “In a samaritan shot,” he traverses “the stony yardage” between himself and the VP and straddles “the writhing huge blunt older man, who was, at this new close emergency range, now revealed” to the AR “to have large facial pores, blankly kind eyes, and a delicate capillary web of red in his jowls, his mouth fishily agape, forehead toad-white and sickly sour, chin lost in a pool of his own throat’s meat” (p. 50). “From the moment the pillar and sign were streaked and clipped,” the AR “had been shouting for help in the empty Executive Garage,” but his cries do not reach beyond the building’s lowest level, where the AR is “positively having at” the VP’s “defective heart” and supplying him “with infusions of breath” (pp. 50–1). As he gives CPR, the AR briefly pauses several times to cry “help” into the echoing and untenanted night. Because it is the story’s only spoken word, the AR’s “help” bears a heightened significance—as if the AR, having dimly glimpsed himself in his imperiled colleague, were also calling out for his own rescue.^{Footnote 3} Earlier, the text suggested that, like the “ownership” of the empty Building, the AR’s identity is also “truly an issue, hung in air, unsettled”—like a question posed but as yet unanswered (p. 46). Now that the AR has come face-to-face with his own fragility and grotesque impersonality, the question of his identity is more pressing than ever.

Modern Moral Theories and the Limits of Impersonality

Given the preceding characterization of the Account Representative’s practical and existential predicament, it is intriguing to consider the difference between an impersonal evaluation of his response to the VP and how the AR himself might assess that response. Whereas modern moral theories would consider the AR’s situation from a detached, third-person perspective, narrative ethics, I argue, would assign priority to the AR’s own view of this encounter. As a result, modern moral theories suffer a severe limitation: unlike narrative ethics, they cannot appreciate what would, for the AR, make his response to the VP morally right.

With the possible exception of the moral dilemmas to which they could lead, modern moral theories such as deontology and utilitarianism are presumed to be universally applicable. That is, their proponents suppose that these theories can serve as dependable, ever-relevant bases for the moral analysis of an action, disclosing that action’s status as morally wrong, permissible, or required. From a detached, impersonal vantage point, these theories would regard the AR’s situation and conclude that he is morally required to try to save the VP. To see this, consider the deontological ethics of Immanuel Kant, according to which everyone has an imperfect duty of beneficence. This is a duty to render assistance to persons in need to the extent that one is able. This duty arises because others are, like oneself, rational agents whose happiness depends in part on the achievement of their goals. To care about one’s own goals and happiness while ignoring those of others displays an incoherent bias, for rational agency is everywhere the same and always valuable. So, for Kant, the AR would be required to help the VP because, in this case, any other response would constitute an impermissible indifference to the VP as a rational agent. The VP’s goals—whatever they happen to be—and his happiness hang in the balance. The AR must help.^{Footnote 4} Here, the AR and his colleague are divested of personality, in that each is regarded as a mere rational agent, and, conceptually speaking, they are interchangeable with any two similarly situated rational agents.

Or, were a hedonistic rule utilitarian to assess the AR’s situation, the AR would be advised to follow whatever rule would tend to produce the greatest balance of happiness over suffering. In his present predicament, the AR should act in accordance with a rule that requires a lone bystander to provide assistance to the extent that he is able, for providing such assistance is the course of action most likely to facilitate happiness and to prevent or relieve suffering for all concerned. Here, the value of happiness and the disvalue of suffering are thought of as agent neutral—that is, they are believed not to vary much from person to person. So, when seen from the detached perspective of this moral tradition, the AR and the VP are again limned impersonally, their relevant values and disvalues fungible with those of anyone else. The rule that the AR should follow in these circumstances is the one that anyone else in his situation should obey. From this third-person perspective, the AR fulfills what he is morally required to do when he tries to help the VP.

There is an important feature of the AR’s situation that the theories discussed previously fail to appreciate: as we have seen, it is precisely impersonality that has rendered the AR’s life so unbearably stifling. His workaday existence is as anonymous, vacant, and flat as the parking garage in which he encounters the VP. Just as that chilling structure is the Building’s “deepest plane,” the AR’s troubles are likewise founded on his own impersonality (p. 46).^{Footnote 5} Accordingly, were the AR to ask himself what is the right thing to do in this situation, an impersonal, outsider’s point of view is the last perspective from which he would want to supply an answer. By adopting that perspective, he would only further espouse the anonymity that is at the root of his atrophied existence. Instead, confronted with the horror of his own impersonality, the AR would seek to make sense of his predicament from his own vantage point—a task with which narrative ethics is well equipped to help. That is, were the AR to seek an explanation for the rightness of any particular course of action in this situation, that explanation would not be credible to him unless it told how one or another act would be personal, or why it makes sense for him, in particular, to perform it. But what might such an explanation look like? As the AR runs to assist his fallen colleague, could he (and we) understand him as running toward a life that would be more . . . authentic?

The Account Representative, Narrative Ethics, and Authentic Integrity

The field of narrative ethics is deeply indebted to the work of psychologist Jerome Bruner, who has written eloquently about ways in which the self is both narrator and narrated. In Making Stories, Bruner contends that “there is no such thing as an intuitively obvious and essential self to know,” for

“Self-making is a narrative art,” Bruner observes.^{Footnote 7} That art involves—among much else—a balancing act between autonomy and commitment, between the conviction that “one has a will of one’s own, a certain freedom of choice, a degree of possibility,” and one’s sense of relatedness to others, such as friends, family, and institutions.^{Footnote 8} Furthermore, Bruner claims, when our self-narratives encounter a severe disruption—“you get cancer,” for example, or “your wife leaves you, or your accountant calls to say that . . . you have no money left”—we usually try to address the disruption with “stylistic integrity.”^{Footnote 9} We search for a way both to honor the person that we have been and to be true to the people we love and what they expect of us.^{Footnote 10} In such ways, we seek continuity over time.

Although it strikes me as thin to see the “self” as no more than the joined hands of narrator and narrative, Bruner’s account illuminates much about what it means for us to hold ourselves together. Whereas he refers to stylistic integrity, narrative ethicists speak similarly of a person’s narrative integrity, unity, or coherence. Narrative integrity is a narrative value, a value that we discover partly within our experience of narratives, or as we author and receive stories. As we receive stories (e.g., as readers, viewers, or listeners), we value a character that shows some degree of continuity, because such coherence allows us to form expectations of her, to anticipate others’ responses to her, and to place her within the story as a whole. As we read of a detective who approaches a case with care and insight, we expect him to evince those traits with each new case that he encounters. And as he does so, we read on confidently in our understanding of him. In similar ways, the continuity of our stories about ourselves aids our self-understanding, helping us to know what to expect of ourselves, to anticipate others’ responses to us, to locate ourselves within other stories, and the like. Of course, however, we do not always wish for a character to stay the same throughout a story. If we regard her as morally deficient, we might hope that she will change. We see a movie in which a real estate agent has always valued ladder climbing above all else, leading her to be consistently selfish and unscrupulous. She should make a radical break with her past, we might feel—embrace a sharp discontinuity. Instead of appealing to narrative integrity, our judgment of her might invoke some extranarrative ideal, such as fairness or generosity. As Arthur Frank points out, narrative ethics must take care not to make narrative integrity a master principle or ideal, for consistency with one’s past alone “hardly guarantees good future decisions.”^{Footnote 11} Nevertheless, as a narrative ideal, integrity offers narrative ethicists a useful starting point as they try to understand how a story should unfold.^{Footnote 12}

To see this, consider the connection between narrative integrity and the extranarrative ideal of authenticity, a value that has come to pervade Western culture over the last two centuries. As Carl Elliott observes, “‘To thine own self be true’ articulates perfectly the notion of authenticity as a moral ideal: the idea that we each have a way of living that is uniquely our own, and that we are each called to live in our own way rather than that of someone else.”^{Footnote 13} Authenticity has to do with realizing one’s special talents and aspirations and desires, but it also involves drawing on one’s unique history. Real persons and fictional characters achieve integrity and authenticity in part by being faithful to those aspects of their histories that they regard as most significant, by being true to themselves in that way. The yearning for sex-reassignment surgery would strike many people as strange or even abhorrent. But when Jan Morris casts that yearning as part of her quest for authenticity in her memoir, Conundrum, claiming that, even as a very young boy, she knew that she had been born into the wrong body, “we immediately understand what she means,” Elliott writes.^{Footnote 14} We sympathize with her desire to be faithful to her past. Guided by our ethos of authenticity and the value of narrative integrity, we appreciate a life story that builds on or extends those aspects of its subject’s history that she regards as most important. And this is so whether the life story is that of a fictional character or a real person. Such a story and its subject achieve what we might call authentic integrity.

Authentic integrity is an ideal that a person or character might achieve to varying extents. Contrary to what Tom Tomlinson has argued, even if narrative “coherence can be achieved through indefinitely many routes,” it does not follow that those various routes will produce narratives with equal unity or coherence.^{Footnote 15} “My narrative (my story so far),” Tomlinson writes, “will shape what I do no matter what I do. And no matter what I do, it will be intelligible within the narrative of my life.”^{Footnote 16} Different courses of action will produce stories that “will all equally be unities,” Tomlinson claims.^{Footnote 17} But this is misguided. Authentic integrity emphasizes what is most important to the subject of a life story. So any particular life story will be more or less intelligible, more or less unified, due to its relationship to its subject’s ways of valuing her past. As a child, I loved baseball, and I played the sport for a few years. But it would be almost unintelligible for me to drop everything now and pursue a career as a professional baseball player. And that is partly because, for me, that part of my past no longer bears much value. Were I a character in a story who changed course in such an arbitrary way, readers would disapprove of my unity or integrity as a character. And were I really to act in such a way, I would experience my own story as terribly fragmented, almost incoherent, and therefore lacking—in this respect, at least—in meaning and worth. So, for narrative ethics, the extent to which a life story achieves authentic integrity can serve as one component of a moral assessment of that life.

Sometimes, a person’s or character’s achievement of authentic integrity has to do with his response to the sort of severe break or disruption that Bruner has discussed. In Wallace’s story, the AR finds himself in the midst of precisely such a break, and the narrative leaves him there. Nevertheless, drawing on the ideas discussed previously, narrative ethics can understand the AR’s response to the VP as one that is personal, in that, from the AR’s perspective (and from ours), that act could infuse his life story with greater authentic integrity. To see how, consider the AR’s ex-wife. We do not know when or why their marriage ended, what they might feel for each other now, or whether they maintain any relationship at all. But we do know that her influence on him persists. Early in the story, before his encounter with the VP, the AR has a brief experience of his “helmeted scooter as Shetland centaur, sprite-ridden,” and this vision is attributed to his ex-wife’s interest in “the combined and confabulated sides of things” (p. 47). Later, we learn more about her: she was “the petite new-Bohemian almond-eyed Red Cross volunteer instructor” who certified the AR in CPR “and whom the Account Representative had, one spontaneous and quartz-lit evening, bought a cup of coffee and a slice of nine-grain toast, and had asked to the Sales Trainees’ Annual Formal, and had married” (p. 51). These passages carry special weight because, with one small exception,^{Footnote 18} they convey all that we know of the AR’s past and life outside of the Building. They are the only points at which the story briefly inflates his otherwise constricted existence. No matter how rote and impersonal the AR’s life has become, we learn—and, more significantly, the AR remembers—that he has not always been such a person. He used to be capable of care and spontaneity, and the fact that he recalls this segment of his past seems to suggest that he yearns to embody those traits again.

Most importantly, the AR’s ex-wife continues to influence him in that he seems to regard his response to the VP as his obedience to her “dictum” to err, when in doubt, “always on the side of prepared care and readiness to preserve minimal life-function, until help could arrive” (p. 51). In light of this motivation, the AR has an opportunity to understand his giving CPR to the VP as a personal act that builds a bridge of continuity with his past, an act through which he might revive the more affectionate and spontaneous person he once was. That is, in the midst of this break or disruption—that of another’s urgent need for care, but also the AR’s troubling vision of himself—the AR has a chance to bring more unity or coherence to his life story by being true to the person he was with his ex-wife.^{Footnote 19} As Bruner notes, Aristotle refers to such a severe break or disruption as a “peripeteia.”^{Footnote 20} “Knowing where the peripeteia has happened, or is occurring at this moment in people’s lives, is essential for grasping their story . . . and beginning to recognize how they might go on from here,” Martha Montello proposes.^{Footnote 21} This disruption presents the AR and his self-narrative with a momentous opportunity to grow in authentic integrity.

However, in the end, we do not know what impact the AR’s response to the VP will have on the younger man’s self-narrative. Through this encounter, will he overcome his shivering isolation, his habitual distance keeping from others? Will he fully revive his capacities for intimacy and spontaneity? We cannot say. Just as the life of the VP hangs in the balance, the AR remains in moral limbo between impersonality and greater authentic integrity. The story ends with the AR still “bent to what two lives required, below everything,” as he calls “for help again and again” (p. 52). Unfortunately, the outlook seems bleak. Despite the AR’s persistent cries for help, his shouts fail to reach the municipal street high above, where “two lovers walked . . . listening for but hearing always no real difference” in the sounds of the city (p. 50). Furthermore, the AR’s strength is quickly fading: his “arms and lumbar” begin to burn, and he breathes and sweats heavily (p. 51). On the other hand, perhaps there is reason for guarded optimism. As Kasia Boddy notes, simply by running to aid his fallen colleague, the AR has already accomplished the seemingly impossible: he has made parallel lines meet.^{Footnote 22} Furthermore, on what appears to be Wallace’s mature view, a morally reinvigorated AR need not abandon his corporate commitment. On the contrary, for Wallace—who appears to have shared Stanley Cavell’s “Romantic view of ‘the everyday’ as ‘an exceptional achievement’”^{Footnote 23}—the AR might find a way to return admirably to his post in Accounts, assimilating his newly recovered characteristics to his current profession.^{Footnote 24}

Medical Encounters That Strike Home

In a discussion of how painful a medical relationship can be, Rita Charon quotes one of her medical students: “‘What happens . . . if the patient’s problem is something that you are personally having to deal with? What happens if it strikes home?’ At age twelve,” Charon explains, “this student had lost her mother to gastric cancer, and she had just interviewed a patient whose mother had been diagnosed with the same disease.”^{Footnote 25} To this student, Charon acknowledged that “much of medicine . . . strikes home.”^{Footnote 26} Not only can doctors contract diseases from their patients, she says, but “we also get emotionally and existentially wounded by patients who arouse anxieties or who . . . force us to reexperience painful episodes in our own lives or to face unresolved ongoing conflicts. As we get more skilled in our work,” she concludes, “we learn not to dodge reminders of personal suffering but to allow our own injuries to increase the potency of our care of patients” by strengthening our “empathic bond with others who suffer.”^{Footnote 27}

Wallace’s story has something to say about a medical encounter that strikes home. But whereas Charon focuses on how an intrapersonal encounter of this kind might lead to more empathy for patients, the AR’s predicament alludes to possible benefits for clinicians. When a patient reminds a healthcare provider of something disconcerting from her past, might this not present her, the clinician, with an opportunity to develop morally? Wallace’s story suggests that the answer is yes: when it disturbs, an intrapersonal encounter might prove to be an opportunity for the clinician to achieve greater authentic integrity. Like the Account Representative, the clinician could approach such a patient encounter as a chance to grow by reclaiming some neglected but important part of her past—as long as her doing so is in line with the most appropriate care for the patient, as Charon reminds us.^{Footnote 28} Now, with the cancer patient mentioned previously, the clinician might grieve as she once should have grieved, show the compassion that she didn’t show, confront the fear that she couldn’t face, or whatever else. She might do something like that which, once upon a time, she failed to do for others or for herself.