WHATSUP. Just finished reading your meta about Neil and Identity and I am living for it. Wow, that was such a good analysis and I fucking love how much more I could appreciate the story. Like hot damn. ty. Anyways I wondered if you could explain a little more on 1) what you meant by Uncle stuarts rescue not weakening the story and 2) im still a little hazy as to the negation of the negation and what exactly the stakes raised even further would be? Tyty <3
Aww, thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it! <3
This got….a little long……
I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to start with your second question first. And before I get to negation of negation, I’m going to talk a little about story values. According to Robert McKee, story values are “the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.” They are things like love/hate, life/death, good/evil, etc. If written well, each scene in a story will result in a change in a story value. (You can have more than one story value per story, obviously.)
You can take a story value and break it down. First is the positive. The opposite of the positive is the contradictory.
Love (Positive) -> Hate (Contradictory)
Between the Positive and Contradictory is something that is a bit negative but not the opposite, and that’s called the Contrary.
Love (Positive) -> Indifference (Contrary) -> Hate (Contradicotry)
The Negation of the Negation is “at the limit of the dark powers of human nature.” It’s worse than the opposite. You can generally get a version of it by this formula: Contradictory + “masquerading as” + Positive. (Or you can do “perceived as” too.) In the example above, that would make the Negation of the Negation: Hate masquerading as Love.
Love (Positive) -> Indifference (Contrary) -> Hate (Contradicotry) -> Hate Masquerading as Love (Negation of the Negation)
The idea is that adding the lie (the “masquerading as”) makes the Negation of the Negation worse than the opposite (Contradictory). It’s much darker to deal with someone pretending at love when they actually hate.
Another variation that makes it more internal would be:
Love (Positive) -> Indifference (Contrary) -> Hate (Contradicotry) -> Self-hate (Negation of the Negation)
Neil’s story value for his internal story arc is “truth.”
That breaks down as:
Truth (Positive) -> White Lies/Half-truths (Contrary) -> Lies (Contradictory)
To get the Negation of the Negation you can make it “Lies masquerading as Truth” or like the love/hate example above, you can have the variation “Self-deception.”
Neil’s story value then ends up looking like this:
Truth (Positive) -> White Lies/Half-truths (Contrary) -> Lies (Contradictory) -> Self-deception (Negation of the Negation)
Not all stories reach for the Negation of the Negation, but stories exploiting the highest stakes should. Neil’s brush with self-deception, the Negation of the Negation, is when his POV switches to Nathaniel. After Baltimore, he struggles with whether or not he can really be Neil Josten. But Neil isn’t just the constructed identity he was at the beginning of the story, and Andrew reminds him of that.
“Can I really be Neil again?”“I told Neil to stay,” Andrew said. “Leave Nathaniel buried in Baltimore with his father.”
Neil is the “truth” and Nathaniel is the “lie.” Nathaniel is the boy that was scared of his father and couldn’t get past that. Neil isn’t that boy anymore.
Which gets to your first question about my statement about “Uncle Stuart’s rescue not weakening the story.” I’ll caveat and say that Neil not saving himself does weaken the story a little because you always want the main character to have agency, but it isn’t crucial to his internal story arc. Life/death is the external story value at the moment he’s with his father, but despite Neil’s conviction that he was going to die throughout most of the series, very little of the action in the story hinged on life/death. Life/death is typically the driving force of action stories, which TFC isn’t. Neil surviving that moment with his father is big, but it’s not as big as Neil choosing Neil over Nathaniel for his identity. If Nora failed to deliver that decision, we as readers would have felt like there was something missing and been disappointed. To speculate, a failure to deliver that moment might have simply been Neil accepting his new identity as Neil Josten without ever undergoing that struggle. He spent the series moving from lie -> half-truth -> truth. It’s the natural progression, but we’ll feel like something significant is missing without that moment because nothing arrived to challenge that final transition into truth. It would seem almost too easy. Instead, we get something even better because he is SO CLOSE to becoming the truth when he is faced with the absolute worst.
In the face of the deus ex machina rescue by Uncle Stuart, we only shrug a little and move on. That minor disappointment of Neil not rescuing himself doesn’t linger and make us wonder what went wrong with the story.
Edit to add: you can find the beginning of the original series of neil and identity posts here.