ABSTRACT
This chapter is narratological in scope and develops the questions of the previous chapters by unpacking the study’s key relationship between accidents and narrative. First, it expands the notion that accidents in written narratives are not accidental, and, second, it argues that narrative configures the experience of accident in phenomenological experience according to the teleological logic of a story. Using J. M. Coetzee’s 2006 novel Slow Man as a case study, the chapter develops insights from a phenomenological narrative theory to suggest that the interpretation of an accident when reading a written narrative is always doubled, both contingent and necessary at once. The chapter then turns to Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological discussion of mimesis, and the role of anticipated retrospection in narrativisation, to suggest that the experience of an accident in real life involves a similar configuration of contingency into narrative necessity. The chapter seeks to reframe assumptions about real-life contingency through the lens of narrative; it suggests not only that narrative mediates the experience of an actual accidental event in life but also that reading contingency models the dual modalities of contingency and necessity, chance and fate, that underwrite the experience of living contingency.
