Narrative Rhyme and the Good Life

I discuss Charles Baxter's criticisms of progressive and dysfunctional variants of narrative theory, along with his defense of what he calls narrative rhyme, which counters the ideas of both progression through an ordered series of events and entanglement in the loop of trauma with that of repetition. Rather than being developmental in nature, narratives of this sort are permutational, inviting a succession of oblique approaches to one and the same character or situation, which affords us a variety of perspectives on the basis of which we come to acknowledge the world's, and our own, complexity.