Human Life as the Divine's Narrative

 

Human Life as the Divine's Narrative
    
    Ted Chiang's "Exhalation" is a powerful short story about the unchanging nature of time.  Along with this notion of past and future being the same in that both are fixed, Chiang suggests that Allah or divine God has complete control over the human life and treats it like his narrative.  Like with a narrative novel, humans read to make interpretations and gain knowledge, as they are unable to change the events of the past and influence their future implications.  Such events are written in stone by our Creator, and if we were to revisit our past, or read our life story with agency as suggested by Ozeki in A Tale for the Time Being, the only thing that would actually change is our knowledge.

    When reading and rereading narrative novels, the setting and plot are the same regardless of how many times we reread them.  In the case of this short story--which considers human life as a narrative written by Allah--every time-traveler experienced a narrative; for example, when narrator Fuwaad ibn Abbas encountered Raniya's time-traveling story, he recounts, "For a moment I was unsure if I were dreaming or awake, because I felt as if I had stepped into a tale, and the thought that I might talk to its players and partake of its events was dizzying" (51-52).  He recognizes that he is passing another's tale, but proceeds to find his own in which, although already written, he hopes to find emotional relief from the guilt of his past.  When he finds that his wife Najya had in fact died before he arrived, he relives his initial experience of emotional trauma and grief.  Since he lived his life in virtue and repentance following her death, Allah granted him the opportunity to discover knowledge that would relieve him upon his return to the present day: his companionship with his wife had made her happy in her short life.

In narrative, individuals discover knowledge, either explicitly presented to them by the narrative or implicitly, personally discovered by the reader.  Readers of narrative are visitors in time, according to the theory of Narrative Time.  Allah/God has control over our narrative, while we have control of how we learn from the events of this narrative: "If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive our lessons" (56).  From reliving the past of his narrative and learning about the experiences of others through parable-like recounts, Fuwaad ibn Abbas realizes, "My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned changed everything" (56).  Through learned virtues of repentance and forgiveness, individuals grow from their past.  Although Allah/God is in complete control of our narrative, we the "players: are in control of what we learn from it, which is the purpose of divine control of individual narrative: "There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness.  That is all, but that is enough" (57).  God's narrative of human life may be fixed, but the knowledge and virtue to gain from it is infinite.

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