An excerpt from a Frank Rich op-ed in the New York Times from Sunday, December 8:

'Caroline,' Kennedy and Change
"The Kennedy assassination shattered conventional ways of seeing and understanding reality," David M. Lubin writes in "Shooting Kennedy," a fascinating cultural history published this fall. In this, Mr. Lubin both describes the [Tony] Kushner sensibility that is so in tune with our moment and echoes Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory," the classic study of how the charnel house of World War I provoked a new literature of irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror. The trouble with the designs for the ground zero memorial is that they can't apply this lesson to our own horror. The competition's rules and deadline required that 9/11 be presented as a coherent story with a settled conclusion, rather than as a moment in which history shattered and has yet to be made whole.

To overview briefly the rest of the article, Rich was writing about a new, for lack of a better word, musical called "Caroline, or Change" by playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. Set in 1963, the Kennedy assassination happens in the first act of the three-act show. The rest is the aftermath.

Two things struck me. One, a reference to "a new literature of irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror" and that some are desperately trying to present 9/11 "as a coherent story with a settled conclusion."

These two ideas together remind me of Dostyoevsky’s Underground Man, which I need to re-read soon. One of the main ideas that’s stuck with me from that book is that it is in man’s nature to act as he will act – rationally or irrationally, but almost always mysteriously. That no human can predict what humans will do, because human beings themselves hardly know what they will do.

Or to put it another way, "who can know the heart of man"?

In my postmodern literature and life class in college, we learned about narratives and metanarratives. In the class, the point was that people tell stories for their own reasons, and the words they choose shape the way the story is remembered. Open a Russian history textbook – or an American one for that matter. Human beings have a natural and strong attraction and affinity for the arc of a story, a beginning middle and end.
And so many forms of information we receive, and certainly our entertainments, use this form to grab and hold our interest.

But when does a story obfuscate an essential truth that we must face? For the characters in "Caroline, or Change" – and for Americans following JFK’s assassination – their storyline had been decimated. The ending didn’t turn out like they thought. There was no satisfying ending. There wasn’t even a middle.

Art that engages this idea: that we are not all part of a story with a predictable or tidy beginning middle and end – let alone happy end – can also be difficult. Difficult to understand and difficult to like. Which are the novels following World War I that Frank Rich was referring to, these novels that use "irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror." I’d like to find out, and will.

What are the stories that I cling to? What are the arcs I have built up in my own mind, the beginnings, middles and ends? What are they stopping me from doing – and what can they help me to do?