"Lost in the Woods" (Nelson) Reading Response

Antonya Nelson's story led me to think deeply and rewardingly about how the "tropes" of story are constructed, with her construction of choice being the literal or metaphoric premise of a character lost in the woods. As I read the simple characteristics of this kind of story as imagined by children ("A person... goes into the woods alone.... discovers a friend... and then is no longer alone"), I began to realize how many of both my favorite narratives and the most celebrated in literary history follow this pattern. Nelson brings up Dante's Inferno as a clear example of the latter, and I thought of Murakami's 1Q84 and Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. In most cases the story is complicated or extended by time, space, a longer plot arc, or in Murakami's case, the supernatural, but the basic skeleton remains familiar. I began to question why this narrative is used over and over again, before considering that it is engaging, attention-holding, and makes the reader hopeful and less alone herself.  The point of a story is to be read, after all, and sometimes I forget how narrative is shaped and standardized by simple human factors like boredom and anticipation. This narrative is reinforced even from an early age, as the children of Nelson's subject Vivian Paley recounts. This narrative is self-perpetuating, in that it sets up predictable goals and checkpoints for itself, as opposed to life in "the real world," which is often random, unpredictable, and, most of all, boring. In the "real world," sometimes nothing ever happens. Sometimes we do not find a friend or better ourselves through our experiences in the dark woods, and most of the time we don't enter the woods at all. Thus it's difficult not to view stories like these as wish fulfillment, a kind of preparing oneself for the experiences we might one day face with the successes of others.
Again, I enjoyed this reading's reference to Eugenides in the form of his Marriage Plot. The first time I read that novel I was indifferent and a little unimpressed, but over time I've come to appreciate its subtleties. Nelson would appreciate the uneasy, if not unhappy, conclusion, which helps to complicate the trope of the "marriage plot" that the story simultaneously invokes and refutes.