Charles Baxter: Mistakes (January 1994)

How does a political climate of deniability—public figures refusing to take responsibility for their actions—corrupt the art of storytelling?  Charles Baxter argues that stories should discover what happens, and that blaming outside forces while denying characters their mistakes, which have an equal claim on truth, freezes narrative into determinism. Drawing on examples ranging from King Lear to Joyce’s “The Dead,” Baxter argues that allowing characters mistakes frees them from our insistence that they represent us.