Unwritten #33.5 is a brilliant examination of the role stories play in our lives and in the societies in which we live. To illustrate their pervasive influence, stories manifest in many forms throughout this book. In order of appearance, there is the story that we are reading concerning Madame Rausch’s past, then nested in this is Johann Rausch’s narration of the tale, the stories Caroline tells her daughter, Anna-Beth’s puppetry, catechisms, the story of Adam and Eve, and finally the stories told within the Toller house to keep the whole mess running. The narrative is set in a recursive structure where each story loops back upon the stories that precede it. For example, the story of Adam and Eve is followed by Herr Toller’s exhortations on conventional gender roles in patriarchal societies. The latter, as a derivative of the former, repeats the story of Adam and Eve.

It’s also possible to interpret this book as a meditation on fate. Puppetry serves as a metaphor as Anna-Beth, manipulator of marionettes, controls the fates of their real life counterparts. The suggestion seems to be that one’s fate is subject to both the caprice and moral judgment of an external actor. This seems reasonable enough: there’s some good and plenty of bad behavior on display, and it’s tempting to project our own (clearly reasonable) judgments of these behaviors onto the characters exhibiting them.

The rub, though, is that aside from the obvious case of Herr Toller, we often aren’t sure who is on what side of the moral fence. Even Johann Rausch, after discovering what was happening to Anna-Beth during her nightly recitations, chooses not to intervene and instead attempts to run as far away as possible. Anna-Beth also inhabits a moral grey area: while certainly a victim, she effectively murders all the townspeople by the end of the book. One reason this good-bad distinction is so hard to make is that we’re never quite sure we’re getting the whole truth. Our information—-just like that of the book’s characters—-comes from stories, and our opinions of these characters naturally vacillate as we are presented new information.

Instead of serving as an exemplum of the fate awaiting those who choose a life of immorality, the book’s point is probably married closer to its structure. We tell ourselves stories, recursively repeating them to ourselves and our progeny, in an attempt to make sense of the world and our place in it. Eventually, these stories not only reverberate throughout our society and the broader culture but become part of them. This book’s central insight is that, in truth, every story is a kind of artifice. Stories are constructions and therefore, by definition, cannot be perfect reflections of the realities they describe. The stories that bear the closest resemblance to the truth—-to reality—-often aren’t the ones that are repeated ad nauseam but rather the unspoken, unwritten ones that inhabit the silences between what is said.