Lost: Poststructural Metanarrative or Postmodern Bildungsroman?
The primary goal of this introductory paper is to define the terms "poststructural metanarrative" and "postmodern Bildungsroman," and to examine how they are relevant to Lost. I will also pose several questions that arise from the show when it is considered from this perspective. There are more questions in this paper than answers, but that was part of my goal: to generate a sustained dialogue with the audience on this and other conceptual issues relevant to Lost; and to encourage the development of the intellectual community concerned with the study of this innovative and important program.
In short, 'post-modern' and 'bildungsroman', two admittedly problematic terms, refer here to the largely self-contained narrative of the show: the story of the castaways that takes place in the present, past, and since the final episode of Season Three, the future. 'Post-structural metanarrative' could refer to larger self-reflexive, metafictional framing elements - such as the Lost game, the Bad Twin book, and the extensive internet commentary - but here I am concentrating on those elements embedded within the primary narrative that have the potential to undermine its core realism, elements that question the nature of memory and identity, fiction and reality.
I will begin then, with the primary narrative - the story of the castaways after the crash of Oceanic flight 815 on the island - which of course includes a backstory for each of the main characters that has only gradually been revealed through flashbacks. Together these narratives do not combine to form a Bildungsroman in the sense of the German novel of education and formation - a story of growing up per se. But Lost seems to be about growth into emotional maturity for many of the characters, regardless of their age - a theme that is consistent with our contemporary emphasis on adult self-improvement and self-knowledge. Thus Charlie overcomes his addiction, Jack takes charge of the group, Claire assumes responsibility for her child, Hurley finds a new courage, and Sawyer allows himself to fall in love.
In his study of the Bildungsroman, John R. Maynard comments that a major element of the form is the theme of identity: the nature of human nature. The Bildungsroman is not necessarily committed to the idea of an essential human nature, but it often examines the relative effects of environment and individual predisposition, or moral choice, for the creation of character.1 In Lost we do have the context of a dramatically-shifted geographic and social setting - the result of traumatic event that, for most of the castaways, seems to have occurred when they were already in the midst of a personal crisis. Suddenly torn from their usual lives, they have plenty of time, and stimuli, on the island to provoke a meditation on who they really are and how they got to this point, on core beliefs that no longer seem valid, and on maps of the world inherited from family systems that now need to be redrawn. We see this largely through the flashbacks: Charlie's initial use of heroin, Jack being bullied by his father, Locke's exploitation by his parents, Sawyer's early lessons about the dire consequences of passion and jealousy, and most disturbingly, Ben's rejection of his abusive father. For the Executive Producer Carlton Cuse, "these are heroes born out of moments" who "always act most nobly when they act in the spirit of community."2 This is human nature strongly affected by circumstance but also rooted in established traits that become increasingly evident over time.
While in the larger sense Lost is a story about character development, at every age, midway through the series it is not clear if this will emerge as a primary theme. After all, it is difficult to change who you are, and the characters are of sufficient complexity that the inevitable darker, more destructive sides of their personalities have emerged, and continue to do so. Despite behavior to the contrary, Desmond may still be a coward, Sawyer a con man, and Locke a self-destructive victim. Jack has a grace and maturity on the island that is much less evident in his flashbacks, or flashforward. They are all both the people of the past and the present, and now, future, and it is hard to tell which, if any, of these time frames, will dominate, or if these pieces will come together to form a coherent gestalt of self-actualized personality.
Much of what we know about these characters is from flashbacks of an uncertain etiology. They could be moments of soul-searching clarity or self-affirming, self-protecting, denial. If their function is to illuminate the larger theme of that episode, it is unclear how much of this information is for the benefit of the viewer alone. Are these are lessons already learned, now re-remembered? Or are they events that have been reframed, a process stimulated by the circumstances of the present? There is a tantalizing ambiguity about these memories, given the motives they reveal about their narrators. We are encouraged to trust the characters by the sincerity with which they seem to remember, and the depth of feeling displayed in the past and present. But the degree to which a flashback is an accurate re-creation of an actual event is rarely clear, as the isolated setting provides so little corroborating evidence. And all of the characters are provided with motives that might compromise the construction of memory, which is at best a subjective process. Does Sayid really want to confront his past as a torturer? Is John really as naïve as he seems? To what extent is Kate capable of loyalty? Do we trust the characters to remember their lives with clarity, and anything approaching objectivity? As a narrative device, memory often has a precision that we know does not exist in real life. Nevertheless, the authorial intent might still be to provide additional access to a character's essential self, seen through their own perspective of increasing self-reflexive maturity. But I think what we are getting, at least in part at least, is a postmodern search for a fragmented 'truth' - one that does not exist in any objective sense. Characters are seen making decisions and performing actions, and suffering the consequences in both the present and past, but it is the latter that foregrounds the role of memory, suggesting that these recalled 'truths' might indeed be a condition of subjectivity.
This post-structural aspect of Lost is one of its most interesting elements, existing as it does in tension with a very un-postmodern sincerity. On the one hand Lost plays with the idea of absolute truth through the destabilization of identity, history and perception. Within its own fictional universe, the self is presented, in part, as a fictional construct. Certainly the characters are complex and realistic, but at the same time Lost has a certain new Historicism about it -identity is a social construction, mediated through the language of memory, and all truth is relative.
The island too has an uncertain status. It seems like a real place, but it has so many unreal aspects - the crashing black cloud of a 'monster', the mysterious healing effect, the bizarre coincidences with Hurley's numbers, the relationships between some of the castaways in both the past and present - that we are again prompted to consider the structure of the narrative. There is also a prevalence of references to other texts beyond the immediate narrative. Philosophical names like Hume, Rousseau and Locke, books with related themes, such as Watership Down, The Lord of the Flies, and numerous other examples draw attention to the constructed, fictional nature of Lost.
At the same time there is an unmistakable authenticity to the characters - or at least to the castaways - that is at the center of each episode, in both timeframes. Some of the most intense moments of the show are starkly realistic in their emotional content: Jack's anger and grief over his father's death, his face when he sees Kate with Sawyer, and the loss he experiences in the flashforward; Sawyer's killing of Anthony Cooper; Rose's reunion with Bernard; Juliette watching her sister and her child, to name just a few examples. This is reinforced by the contrasting lack of affect usually displayed by the Others. These intense, very believable moments mitigate the ambiguity of the characters, suggesting that although memory may be unreliable, its associated feelings are real. I suspect that just as the gradual unfolding of logical reasons for what earlier seemed odd reasserts the realism of the plot - the polar bears having been brought to the island by the Dharma Initiative, for example - this may too be a device designed to enhance one of the core elements of the show, its mystery. But whether or not the characters end up having solidly integrated humanist selves or not, sincerity and believability are strong elements that dominate the show's more post-structural aspects.
And while Lost is to some degree about narration itself, it also contains a less reflexive totalizing meta-narrative. For even though it follows the postmodern dictum that all narratives are local, it has several overarching themes, including the complexity of the human heart and the possibility of redemption, that are more in the mode of universal truths embedded in a particular mythology than fictions to be deconstructed. There is also a strong suggestion within the narrative of a larger order lurking behind it - of answers that once revealed that will ultimately explain the lingering mysteries, rationalize the improbable coincidences and tie all of the loose ends together. Lost's creators describe it as a 'mosaic' with elements from the past, present and future that will fit together in the end (and I do hope this will be the case).3
Lost also does not have a particularly postmodern hyperconsciousness - what Jim Collins calls "a hyperawareness on the part of the text itself of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the conditions of its circulation and reception."4 Individual characters provide plenty of sarcasm and irony, but this is never self-referential with respect to the show as a whole - it doesn't degenerate into parody. When the larger narrative alludes to its status as fiction it does so without compromising the emotional integrity of the individual castaways and their memories. They are not aware of being characters, or vehicles for larger themes. Locke does not comment on his distinctive name, or its possible associations with the situation in which he finds himself; Sawyer says that Watership Down is 'about bunnies,' without examining the irony that this particular book survived the crash. Again, the sincerity of the narrative is primary, and the hints that all may not be as it seems remains in the background. There is, then, a tension between the foregrounding of the structural aspects of Lost and the maintenance of the 'fourth wall' within the story itself - with the island as a self-contained thematic narrative within the larger contemporary sea of intellectual context, as it were.
Michelle A. Lang
This paper was originally presented at the 2007 MidAtlantic Conference on Popular Culture in Philadelphia as "Structure and Narrative in Lost," the lead paper in the panel Lost: Poststructural Metanarrative or Postmodern Bildungsroman?
1 John R. Maynard, "The Bildungsroman," A Companion to the Victorian Novel, Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing eds., (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 286-87). See also: Marian Hirsch Gottfried and David H. Miles, "Defining Bildungrsroman as a Genre," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 91 (Jan. 1976), 122-23. back
2 "Lost: the Answers," first broadcast ABC 5/17/07. back
3 Nellie Andreeva, "End in Sight for Lost: 48 Episodes, 3 Seasons," The Hollywood Reporter, May 7, 2007. back
4 Jim Collins, "Television and Postmodernism," Film and Theory: An Anthology, Robert Stam and Toby Miller eds., (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 763). back