ABSTRACT
To the degree that the culture in which one lives fails to provide adequate narrative resources for living one's life meaningfully and productively, one's life story may be experienced as effectively over, thereby leading to what is termed narrative foreclosure. One significant dimension of life stories concerns what might be termed narrative 'fit', which may be understood as that measure of consonance which derives from the retrospective ordering of a life and its ability to be figured into a 'plot' of one sort or another. At an extreme, situations of this sort may lead to a kind of living death, a death in life. One such situation is that of suicide, or at least those instances of it that are tied to presumption that the future is a foregone conclusion. When he had lived in Chicago, Samuel had had a number of paintings in shows and a solid gallery connection, and had even won a prize for his work.
