"Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question"
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Straub is staging a quiet coup against the reader's craving for a single, sanctioned version of events. "Narrative indeterminacy" sounds like craft jargon, but he immediately softens it with "I guess", a disarming hedge that signals this isn’t a manifesto so much as a working suspicion: certainty is usually a posture, not a truth. The target is "taken-for-granted authority", the way stories - especially genre stories - smuggle in hierarchy by pretending one viewpoint is the camera angle of reality itself.
The sentence is built like an argument with its own confidence. "Instead" implies a rejected default: the conventional, authoritative plot that moves forward as if facts are stable and meaning is agreed upon. Straub’s interest lies in the friction between representation and event, in how any account is inevitably an edit, a performance, a selection. By calling out "any particular representation", he’s not merely praising ambiguity; he’s questioning the social and psychological power we hand to narrators, institutions, even memory, when we treat their version as final.
In Straub’s orbit - horror, the uncanny, the literary thriller - this becomes a thematic weapon. Indeterminacy doesn’t just make a story creepier; it makes it ethically charged. If the past can’t be pinned down, then guilt, innocence, trauma, and causality remain contested terrain. The subtext is political as much as aesthetic: whoever gets to narrate gets to rule the meaning of what happened.
The sentence is built like an argument with its own confidence. "Instead" implies a rejected default: the conventional, authoritative plot that moves forward as if facts are stable and meaning is agreed upon. Straub’s interest lies in the friction between representation and event, in how any account is inevitably an edit, a performance, a selection. By calling out "any particular representation", he’s not merely praising ambiguity; he’s questioning the social and psychological power we hand to narrators, institutions, even memory, when we treat their version as final.
In Straub’s orbit - horror, the uncanny, the literary thriller - this becomes a thematic weapon. Indeterminacy doesn’t just make a story creepier; it makes it ethically charged. If the past can’t be pinned down, then guilt, innocence, trauma, and causality remain contested terrain. The subtext is political as much as aesthetic: whoever gets to narrate gets to rule the meaning of what happened.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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