Ever since our savannah-traipsing days spent planning out the hunt through crude grunting (yes, we’re here, and yes, that thing we want to eat is there, so yes, if we want to eat it we have to go there and get it…now here’s how) humans have picked up the Story and never put it down. Man is, at heart, a storytelling beast, and delights in nothing so much as hearing a good yarn. We are, after all, not merely one of the few species with the requisite finely honed communication skills (one has to say “of the few species” because the taxonomical jury is still out to a very extended lunch when it comes to several others, such as dolphins – all that perky clicky chirping has to be communicating something worth hearing – and the miraculous full-thorax dance-language of bees) but we also have a uniquely oppressive conception of time. It’s plausible many animals recall the past on some level, and they’re all acutely aware of the present, yet that’s as far as they get when it comes to storytelling…the ‘been there,’ ‘doing this,’ but never ‘and then.’ We are the only species that can anticipate an end, a complete and total ceasing. We alone can anticipate that such a thing as death truly exists (at least our industrial-farm-beef-fed consciences would like to think so, because hoo boy, are we in for it if the cows have staged a coup and are running the afterlife tribunals). Not only this, but as a corollary, we can understand cause-and-effect – if this, then that – in ways that no other creature seems to.
From our first barely-comprehending days listening to fairy tales read aloud we’re indoctrinated to conceive of a story as a certain sort of thing, a particular kind of structure given form and meaning by the foundational pillars of Opening, Development, Climax, and Resolution. The traditional school of thought teaches students to analyze literature along these lines, to delineate the universal story arc curving gracefully, predictably, and vitally through everything from stories of Coyote the Trickster out of the American Southwest to War and Peace (what was Tolstoy feeding those foundational pillars to get them so huge anyway?). The story arch is an anchor, a lifeline, the shining thread weaving through the narrative labyrinth that assures us, no matter how dark or convoluted or chaotic the prose, our path is right on course as we brush past those familiar structural landmarks.
Given this fundamental and universal axiom of storytelling and story structure, it should come as no surprise that two aspects of the current narrative may be more than slightly disconcerting to the average consumer of story-fare. The first is that, since the true beginning has been lost for reasons that will only become apparent later on (someone dropped the delicate story-arch and shattered it, perhaps? These things aren’t so easy to piece back together) we’re left with no choice other than to begin somewhere further along the standard curve – somewhere in the admittedly ill-defined second act conveniently termed “Development.” Second, just to get this out of the way and since most readers probably have better things to worry about than whether so-and-so is actually going to lose that eye (he does) your narrator wishes to declare that, despite the requisite suspense and occasional page-turner gimmickry, everything really does turn out fairly peachy in the end for almost everyone involved.
That is, so long as everyone involved says and does as they are supposed to.
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Unfortunately for us, Frankie Dasher has always been exceptionally bad at saying and doing whatever he is supposed to say and do – despite, and often to spite, whoever or whatever he’s involved with, and alas! he happens to be hopelessly involved with this uncharacteristically disjointed tale.
