Surviving Reading

The narrator of José Saramago’s novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, writes, “In my honest opinion, the reader of a mystery is the only survivor of the story he is reading, unless it is as the one real survivor that every reader reads a story.” I’ve been thinking about this statement. I read a great many detective novels and stream more than a handful of detective stories. I have read a great many novels in my life. It is obvious that any number of individuals survive in the novels and mystery stories I read. Indeed, in them everyone but the murdered and sometimes (but rarely) the murderer continue to live, so Saramago couldn’t be referring to physical existence when he speaks of the reader of the mystery story as the only survivor. Perhaps what the narrator meant here regarding the reader who survives is that they are the only one who remains physically unchanged by the events narrated in the book. I know that we are taught that reading changes us but I lately have my doubts. What I do know is that the reader arises from their chairs at story’s end and walks to the bookshelves or bookstore for another volume. The reader has survived.            
             I think that it is about novels and short stories (at least) about which the narrator in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis writes when he declares that the real survivor of every story read is the reader, because in any such work none of the characters are real: they are all imagined and when the current plot in which they are engaged concludes they are finished. They have not survived. An author might bring back a character, to resuscitate him or her as it were, but no character can survive the work’s end: only the reader can continue, arise from the chair and continue on in life. When the story ends, so, too, do the characters end: they do not survive the conclusion because at the conclusion of every book the characters remain trapped in it, frozen in time and place. Perhaps a novel’s characters might survive in the minds of a reader, though I think that might be a bit of a stretch not I do not think that this can be seen as survival. It is the reader who alone survives. First person narrators might be survivors because they are alive to tell the tale, but no, I consider, in order to know anything, the narrator must be already somewhere within the story and therefore, does not survive its end. When the narrative is finished so too is the narrator at an end. Ishmael does suggest that he has survived the tragedy of the Pequod, but he is never again seen anywhere by a reader. In the end Ishmael is floating on a coffin. I’m thinking of Isabel Archer: at novel’s end she is trapped, entombed as it were, in her tragic marriage and trapped, perhaps, by her own moral codes. But she can no longer act. She has not endured. No, at a novel’s end, only the reader survives even as I arise from my chair and mourn Isabel’s situation.  
            I am considering the hypothesis, then, that perhaps we read to survive. That the reader recognizes implicitly that they may arise from their chair—from their reading—and that this act gives evidence of their survival. Ironically, we sit down so that we can rise up. The characters remain and are condemned within the story. We enter a novel as a strangers: nobody knows us, not even the author—though I do not think anyone writes without an imagined audience in mind—and we know nobody, and so we all are, as it were, author, reader and characters unfamiliar with each other. Narrators don’t even feel compelled to tell the truth: readers are often lied to by an unreliable narrator. But a reader discovers the deception and moves on from it; the liar remains so. A reader feels lost. Then, at story’s end the reader can acknowledge having been found or even admits to still being lost. To acknowledge being lost is a sign of survival. We cannot be found until we are lost. The environments of stories (even those places that are somewhat personally familiar) are strange: I feel lost in the unfamiliar. Even the most careful descriptions are not enough to enable me to see the place. “Life cannot be reproduced, even the most faithful of reflections, that of a mirror, transforms right into left and left into right,” says the narrator in Saramago’s novel. At the story’s end we leave these people to whom we have been introduced and places that are unfamiliar and rise from our chairs and perhaps somewhat changed continue our lives and leave it all behind. Though a character might remain in the minds of the reader that character has not changed but been changed. The character has not survived but the reader has endured.
            I have read hundreds and hundreds of novels. I have survived my readings. Mostly, I suppose.