The Power of Stories

     Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder and Other Stories departs from the traditional idea of a collection of short stories. It reads more like a novel—while the narrative skips ahead and traces back, selecting moments and sensations and ages—depicting one woman’s life and relationship to stories.

     Not all the stories are the narrator’s own—she tells some of her mother’s, her father’s, her sister’s—some are personal transpositions of stories which exist in their own right. One such story is “The Labrador Fiasco,” which occurs near the end of the book and communicates both the aging of the narrator’s father and the story of three men exploring the unchartered Labrador wild. She narrates them as a story within a story, for in the first her mother reads her father the second. The narrator’s father being a former explorer himself, he interacts with the second story—though from the sad comfort of the home he no longer leaves—pointing out the young men’s mistakes, providing an explorer’s insight. There is a tension, however, as we simultaneously pity the stroke-ridden father who won’t go out, and realize that perhaps the young explorers should have stayed home as they freeze and starve, lost in the wilderness. This narrative both serves as a contrast and as a depiction of age itself, when miles become days and years become decades. This latter sentiment is articulated in the following story, “The Boys at the Lab,” by the narrator’s mother, who, five years after the death of her husband, suffers similarly with the struggles of old age. 

     In “The Boys at the Lab,” the narrator implements another narrative tactic, this time telling stories through the photographs in her mother’s old albums. When it begins, it is nostalgic—the narrator learns these stories from her mother, recounts them, shares them with her. But has her mother loses her memory, her sight, her sense of smell and sound (she has one good ear left), the narrator is forced to recount her mother’s own stories back to her, some of which she remembers, some of which she does not. “The Boys at the Lab” takes a dark turn from the nostalgia as the reality of her mother’s age sets in. The narrator recalls her mother telling her the fate of Cam, one of “the boys at the lab”—the subject of one of her photos—that he died of “some condition.” She alludes that the other, Ray, suffered some alternative but ultimately similar fate, though she won’t reveal what. 

     Eventually, the narrator’s mother no longer remembers the boys at the lab, and the narrator must fill in the blanks of the stories herself. She takes images and creates her own narrative. As I read this story, I am overwhelmed with anxiety—as a reader I have invested in the narrator’s dependence on her mother’s narration. The photos were not of characters but of people, and as the narrator finishes these stories which her mother can no longer recall I am struck hard with the dismal circumstance that no witnesses have survived—I feel her slipping away. The narrator says, “I want them to have more of a story—more of a story than I know, and more than they probably had,” and while she takes shelter from the loose ends in the power of her own stories, I can’t help but want to know the truth.