The story’s authority derives from death lending events absolute uniqueness

Evidence

Concurrent with the disappearance of the genuine story is the increasing concealment of death and dying in our society; for the authority of the story ultimately derives from the authority of death, which lends every event an absolute uniqueness. “A man who died at the age of thirty-five is at every point in his life a man who is going to die at the age of thirty-five”: so Benjamin describes our apprehension of characters in the tale, in antipsychological fashion, as the simplified representatives of their own destinies. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 167

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The compressed claim that narrative authority derives from the authority of death, and its conjunction with the concealment of dying, is dense enough to sit with: storytelling, mortality, and the uniqueness of events folded into a single mechanism.
• ADDENDUM: The death-derived authority of narrative resonates with the sacrifice piece on grief/love and the stabilizing function of death-rituals.
• XREF: connects to: Interiorizing death makes it a personal, responsible feature of a unique life; Death converts the for-itself into an in-itself that only others can interpret — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1259

Broader Connections

• Interiorizing death makes it a personal, responsible feature of a unique life #expands (0.85)
• Death converts the for-itself into an in-itself that only others can interpret #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1259