Though both contemporary fiction and current literary theory are often concerned to tell us that plot is passe, few of us are actually prepared to relinquish the idea of narrative pattern: the process of narration is too closely bound into our sense of humanity. Even from an existentialist perspective, which accurately identifies the reliance on stories with bad faith and inauthentic living, stories remain a human necessity: fiction is "deeply distrusted and yet humanly indispensable"' or " 'fiction' designates an apparently unavoidable tendency to reconstitute the self in more comfortable categories."2 We know, of course, that we cannot expect our lives to respond to easy plotting, but we nevertheless feel a recurrent need to narrate the events of our lives to ourselves and to each other, to give shape to the disorder of lived experience. We use narration to identify possible patterns, to assess causality, to hold onto a self-definition, to make connections between our own lives and the lives of other people. We even, I would argue, feel an individual human need for the closure that our literary texts ostensibly withhold: that is, for the sense of some affirmed destiny which governs and makes sense of the contingency of daily lives, what Frank Kermode has called "a need in the moment of existence, to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end."3