If insisting on the body’s presence

If insisting on the body’s presence within the story seems to sin against narrative’s spirituality, suggesting that we can speak about the body in the story likewise seems to sin against the particularity that we attribute to our own physical existence. Indeed, if asked about the body in the story many of us might think first of the uncomfortable body that intrudes on our reading—the stiff neck that comes from reading too long in bed, the squinting eyes from trying to read a bestseller on the beach, the momentary disorientation we feel when we close a book and reenter the everyday world. In such cases, the body seems to be distinctly individual; it is what designers of reading chairs and book lights seem never quite to get right. Likewise, while we may recognize that there are bodies in stories— and anyone who has seen the stage at the end of Hamletlittered with bodies can hardly think otherwise—these bodies seem to be precisely what intrude at the end of the narrative, what is left after the plot has run its course.