Embedded Stories: Depth in Brevity

My group’s sight read was done with a collection from Lydia Davis. Here, I’m going to write about embedded stories in one of the short shorts: “After You Left.” There are a few kinds of embedded stories here. One type is pretty easy to spot. The passages begin “Imagine the scene”  and  “I imagined.” This is the kind of embedded, or what we called nested, story I usually think of when I think of embedded stories. Far more interesting is the embedded story which reads, in its entirety, “I told him how you and I had spent our time together.”

This line is the largest story in the shortest space in the whole text. As an allusion, this example shows us how an embedded story moves the mind’s eye away from the ‘and then and then and then’ and into a new space time. We don’t know what the story the narrator is telling the “him” referred to in this passage, but we can picture them there exchanging anecdotes. This one line is like a Russian nesting doll. We don’t hear any of these embedded stories directly, but because of our life experience we know what this kind of scene would look like.

If a single line can unfold this way, imagine what the kinds of insight we can gain into narrative through the course of an entire conversation. I suspect if we analyze more dialogue and free indirect discourse we will find the reader’s eye moving everywhere.  So often we think of a story as it is presented to us, from beginning to end. But if we think of space as abstract we can see the complexities in the movements of every allusion, every tangent, every memory.