Identity in the Dark—Deconstruction in Jess Walter’s Short Fiction

Kvothe Harris

Walter’s short story “The Dark” narrates the journey of one newly bereaved man named Doug and his attempts to find love and solace after the death of his late wife Ellie. While it flirts with comedic elements at times, something Walter seems invested in is the idea of whether or not someone can find a new identity outside of marriage and death or if we are always intrinsically tied to the people we love. Through its portrayal of fractured identities, “The Dark” does work to deconstructs the notion of a stable self, showing how characters oscillate between conflicting desires for connection and isolation and exposing the inherently divided nature of identity—while at the same time occasionally reneging its position on the self as unstable to follow a more comfortable outline of grieving and growth.

We are introduced to Doug in the throes of what could be called the worst moments of his life. We get to learn more about him in the process of his wife’s death. Though Ellie seems to be grappling with her own sense of existential dread throughout the story, she’s regularly by Doug seen as more capable of doing so. He struggles on every front both with the actual experiences of Ellie’s slow death and with the aftermath. At every point, he seeks—quite understandably—to define himself and his identity in relation to his wife even when she is no longer with him.

His notion of a stable self, or as one human being made up of solid, identifiable traits that are not subject to change or to become contradictory, is challenged throughout the story. Walter writes, “He was haunted, too, by the realization he’d had during Ellie’s last days, that he had never really known his wife, that the gap between them had always been impossible to breach, as if what he and Ellie had was a kind of mirage, a temporary detour from the existential horror of being alive and alone” (Walter 162). Here we can see that even as he watches his wife slip away from him, he’s beginning to grapple with the idea that there are gaps between him and his wife—gaps between his understanding of his identity and the reality of it. Often, married couples refer to themselves as ‘the other half’ of their partner and we collectively use terms like ‘unit’ or ‘couple’ to explain the uniquely close relationship that marriage often provides. However, Walter’s writing challenges this at the same time as he constructs it, prodding both Doug and the audience to question their understanding of themselves as a stable self.

Even the way that the story is told to the reader supports this idea. The timeline of events as told to the reader moves back and forth between times, illuminating Ellie as she was when she was living, as she was when she was dying, and then referring to her only posthumously depending on Doug’s perspective. Walter uses his third-person narration well to create Doug’s identity to a reader outside of his own brain while still reflecting Doug’s inner thoughts. The whole thing comes together to create a steadily building understanding of Doug as a man created by memories and experiences, functional one moment, broken down the next, and always faintly haunted by the reality that his identity is not always as reliable as he believes it to be.

To understand the way that themes and messaging of “The Dark” can be pieced apart, we must come to grips with how deconstruction can be utilized. When writing about post-structuralism as a critical theory, Robert G. Dunn remarks that “[T]he gaps and absences inherent in language leave open the possibility of ongoing contested meanings and therefore chronic discursive instability. [This approach] thus recognize[s] the emergent properties of human practices, and meaning … is always tentative in the sense that absolute and fixed points of reference are unavailable in an inherently dynamic, constantly changing, and therefore unstable symbolic environment” (Dunn 689). What this means is that there are places in “The Dark” where the language doesn’t quite cover all the ground its meant to. There is a gap between Doug and his sense of self. There is a gap between Doug and his wife Ellie. There is even a gap between what Walter attempts to write and what can be interpreted from it. In these moments, we see that any point of the story where we assume meaning can be permanently fixed is actually a point that can just as easily slide away from us into the murky territory of reinterpretation.

While this ambiguity can certainly benefit a piece of fiction, it can also just as easily unravel beneath greater scrutiny. For example, though Jess Walter clearly challenges the idea of trying to present a stable self when the nature of reality and identity is inherently unstable, the end of “The Dark” retracts this point somewhat. Toward the end of the story, Doug attempts to go out on a date with a woman who turns out to be Ellie’s mortal highschool nemesis. Doug retreats to the bathroom, gripped by his crisis of identity, and when he returns to the table he discovers that Marcie Gearing—the nemesis in question—has vanished without a trace. This, of course, leaves him to foot the bill, at which point Doug looks around the restaurant and begins to contemplate his life and his existence in relation to other people.

Walter writes here that “Doug will think that maybe we never stop loving the people we love, even when they’ve gone back to the dark from which they came. But maybe, if we’re lucky, we get to feel them again, in this case, in the small, shared experience of getting fucked over by Marcie Gearing. And, again, in the warm, familiar laughter of the people we once made together” (Walter 169). To a deconstructionist eye, what this ending shows is the author’s hand intervening with the message of the story. There is a rather clear intention here to wrap the story up in a more conventionally satisfying way, rather than to let the reader sit with the discomfort of Doug’s altered understanding of himself as an unstable entity. This can further be intuited by the way that Walter’s writing sacrifices any nuanced understanding of Marcie’s presumably equally unstable self for an ending that feels as though it’s supposed to be timed to a laugh track.

John M. Ellis, when writing about what deconstruction can contribute to the realm of literary analysis, asserts that “[D]econstruction performs an operation which is variously described as undermining, subverting, exposing, undoing, transgressing, or demystifying; and it performs that operation on something variously thought of as traditional ideas, traditional limits, traditional logic, authoritative readings, privileged readings, illusions of objectivity, mastery or consensus, the referential meaning of a text, or simply what the text asserts or says” (Ellis 261). This definition is crucial to be able to grapple with the ways that Walter’s writing displays curiosity about the notion of a stable or unstable self while at the same time fumbling the ball, so to speak. To perform an operation, borrowing the metaphor that John M. Ellis uses himself, on “The Dark” shows us where Walter’s writing subverts the common understanding of oneself as stable as well as where it falls back on the privileged voice of the story.

After all, Doug spends a good deal of time speaking with Marcie about her own relationship troubles. We are to presume that she’s not exactly had it perfect herself and that she is deeply troubled by the instability she’s discovered in her own life and her own self. When Doug resorts to laughing at her for fleeing abruptly from the restaurant, it shows that Walter still falls back on what is comfortable and stable in writing Doug’s identity rather than continuing to challenge Doug as a character and the themes of “The Dark” itself as a short story. It all comes to a head at the conclusion of the story where Doug essentially sinks into a more familiar version of what he believes to be his own identity. Seeking solace, “The Dark” concludes with Doug observing the community and around him and reidentifying the version of himself that he feels most comfortable with, a man still burdened by memories but defined by his relationships.

While this is not a bad message on an emotional level, it is a flawed one when viewing the story from a deconstructionist perspective. Walter spends a good deal of “The Dark” outlining the way that Doug sees himself as an increasingly fragmented person when the tragedy of his wife’s death fundamentally shifts his sense of self as he understands it. While Walter carries these ideas well throughout most of the story, he reneges on the fullness of the story’s implied promise. He fails to fully grapple with the instability of one’s selfhood, of identity as a concept and a practice, and it is there that the story falls short of what it has the potential to achieve.

Works Cited

Dunn, Robert G. “Self, Identity, and Difference: Mead and the Poststructuralists.” The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 1997, pp. 687–705. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121086. Accessed 23 Nov. 2024.

Ellis, John M. “What Does Deconstruction Contribute to Theory of Criticism?” New Literary History, vol. 19, no. 2, 1988, pp. 259–79. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/469336. Accessed 23 Nov. 2024.

Walter, Jess. “The Dark.” Ploughshares, vol. 49, no. 2, 2023, pp. 160-169, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27225075. Accessed 12 Nov. 2024.