Against the Darkness

John Williams’s novel Stoner tells the tragic life story of a mediocre academic in a loveless marriage. In The New Yorker, Tim Kreider writes that Stoner’s life is “a bummer.” However, the critics (including Kreider) celebrate it, calling it “beautiful,” “incredibly moving,” “unexpectedly exciting,” “inspiriting,” and “perfect,” with “not a single superfluous phrase.” ¹ It is not on the novel’s titular character that these ambiguities rest but, rather, on the narrator of the novel. Using Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, I will argue that Stoner’s story is the narrator’s Apollo. The narrator’s “lamentation itself becomes a song of praise,” as Nietzsche writes (506). My chapter will explore the indeterminate space between the narrator’s poetic voice and the nihilistic worldview with which it contends. In this space between, the liminality between the story and the telling of the story, one sees the beauty of the narrative born.