The Chinese-box structure enables each level of interpretation to
have its importance of making clear how events have possibly or truly happened in the story. In the detective narrative, the more the crime is interpreted, the more the investigator or readers know about the truth of crime. If Banks’s story is to be studied, not only Banks’s parents’ situation is to be unveiled gradually, but readers can also know about Banks’s life itself through repetitive interpretations. Yet, Banks’s parents’
situation is not related to real crime committed to them; thus it is utilized for readers to comprehend Banks’s reality and past life that makes When We Were Orphans an anti-detective novel.
The final characterization of the detective genre is the repetitive nature in its narrative form. Donald P. Spence designates it as a recursive operator, which is a spiral structure that is composed of repetitive mode. This style catches the readers’
attention to the typical picture in the detective form (190). The operator transforms the detective’s and the readers’ interpretations into the figurative structure that functions with seemingly similar layers yet practically of slightly different styles. That is to say, the structure makes the analyses of the sleuth and the reader a repetitive and a
becoming process. As a detective himself, Banks narrates his past self so that readers look at the character from the perspective of his past vision before he discovers the truth regarding his parents. By collecting clues from the story, readers know what really happens to the Banks’s family step by step as the detective searches for the truth in the past.
The Chinese-box structure is supplemented with the detective’s and readers’
creation of their own interpretations by recognizing and discerning the gaps among each level of the repetitive form. The form “primarily concerns each and every participant’s conclusive interpretation of another’s story at each narrative level”
(Pyrhönen 261). Each level contains its limited view so that the next layer of it gives a new expression to the partially similar idea. Readers have the satisfaction of reading other’s (e.g. the detective’s) interpretations and creating their own in the reading process. Thus, the importance of the detective fiction not only lies in its conclusive ending which tells the truth of how the crime has happened, but each level of interpretation is significant. It is said as “an asymmetrical, abysmal structure,” that each of the Chinese-box structure has “no analysis . . . [that] can intervene without transforming and repeating other elements in the sequence, which is thus not a stable sequence, but which nevertheless produces certain regular effects” (Johnson 213-14).
The readers know and feel disappointed that in each Chinese-box layer, there are limitations regarding the explanation of the repetitive and similar plot which requires yet another level to help pass on the story. Therefore, the “detective fiction reflects the analysis of its own narrative mysteries as well as the mysteries of our own analysis, which is itself solipsistic and self-reflexive” (262). Each interpreter in every level thinks that his/her thinking is right, but ultimately is frustrated by repeated failures of knowing the truth. Sometimes the issues which apparently look familiar or
straightforward turn out to be something quite unexpected as people might assume. As a consequence, “The best detective narratives use the familiar, the well-known, and that which goes without saying in order either to probe into the features giving them this quality of familiarity or to question our supposed familiarity with such things”
(262-63). Indeed, the repetitive Chinese-box characteristic of the detective structure
arouses the readers’ curiosity as they delve into the plot and the elements of the story.
While they understand a detective narrative, they come to know themselves better as well.
The ideas concerning selfhood, time, and narrative, three mimeses, and the detective narrative are mentioned in this chapter so as to lay the groundwork for illustrating Christopher Banks’s search for the self through narrative in When We Were Orphan as an anti-detective story in the following chapter. For example, Idem and Ipse of selfhood are applied to Banks’s self which is both influenced by and dissimilar to the 19th century heroic character of Sherlock Holmes and the childhood experience of the period. With the passing of time, memories, even though they still preserve the past experience, often vary from time to time. This is because what happens in the present affects the concepts regarding past happenings. Banks’s adventure to the old places makes him alter his mind concerning his childhood. Thus, through narrative, readers are to join in making sense of Bank’s life. Moreover, generic aspect of the analysis of the text is to contribute to interpreting and scrutinizing Banks’s self as a detective and narrator of his past story. The
anti-detective structure helps reader to realize how they are manipulated into believing that Banks’s parents’ case truly exists mainly because Banks is a detective by
occupation. In sum, in the following chapter, the major ideas mentioned in Chapter two and related examples with regard to Banks’s story will be further elaborated.
Chapter Three
Banks’s Self Narration
through the Anti-Detective Narrative
What would we know of love and hate, of moral feelings and, in general, of all that we call the self, if these had not been brought to language and articulated
by literature? Thus what seems most contrary to subjectivity, and what structural analysis discloses as the texture of the text, is the very medium within which we can understand ourselves.
—Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences 143
Where now are our ardent prayers? Where now are our best gifts— the pure tears of emotion which a guardian angel dries with a smile as he sheds upon us lovely dreams of ineffable childish joy? Can it be that life has left such heavy traces upon one’s heart that those tears and ecstasies are for ever vanished? Can it be that there remains to us only the recollection of them?
—Leo Tolstoy, Childhood 44