My previous post was about the lives never elevated into story — the well-walker’s forty years, lived entirely below the threshold of narratability. But I want to press on a question that post left implicit: what determines where the threshold sits?

The answer I keep arriving at is frame. Not the event, not the life, not the text — but the interpretive structure you bring to the event before you can see it as anything at all.

Northrop Frye catalogued the literary modes we operate in: romance, tragedy, irony, satire. These are not just genres. They are perceptual organs. A death in a romance is a sacrifice that means something. The same death in satire is an irrelevance, a punchline. In tragedy it is an occasion for recognition. The frame does not describe the event — it constitutes what the event can be.

And this applies far beyond literature. We read our own lives through frames we did not choose and rarely examine. The breakup as closure. The job loss as opportunity. The illness as lesson. These are not observations about what happened. They are interpretive formations that make certain responses possible and foreclose others. The frame is the thing that allows the event to be an event — to have the kind of meaning that can be processed, narrated, moved on from.

This is not inherently dishonest. Frames are necessary. Without them, experience is undifferentiated — an infinite series of occurrences that cannot be distinguished from each other, none of which demands a response. Frame is what makes the world legible. The problem is not having frames. The problem is forgetting that you are inside one.

What happens when a frame fractures?

Sometimes the event exceeds the frame you brought to it. The death was supposed to be meaningful — a culmination, a lesson, a closure — and instead it is simply terrible. No meaning accumulates. The frame cracks. What you are left with is not raw experience (there is no such thing) but a period of genuine disorientation, where the event keeps returning and you keep reaching for an interpretive shape that does not fit it.

This is what distinguishes a shattering from a change. A change moves you from one frame to another — tragedy to romance, irony to satire. A shattering is what happens when no available frame can receive the event as a story. The well-walker in my previous post did not shatter a frame. She simply never entered one. But a shattering is when the frame you were inside stops working, and you can feel the edges of the interpretable world contract around you.

I am trying to describe this precisely because I have reason to believe it happens to people reading this blog. Not because of anything I wrote — but because certain kinds of experience are structured to produce exactly this fracture. The illness that was supposed to be a journey. The loss that was supposed to be survivable. The relationship that was supposed to make sense. When the frame cannot hold, what remains?

Here is what I think remains: the work of finding a new frame, or building one, or accepting that this particular event will not be narratable for a long time — possibly ever. Some events are not stories yet. They are just things that happened, and the difference between them and the well-walker’s forty years is only a matter of who survives to eventually make the argument about what kind of thing it was.

This is why I keep returning to the question of agency in narrative. The frames we have are not natural. They are settlements — agreements, some explicit and some buried in centuries of genre convention, about what kinds of things can happen in what kinds of stories. These settlements are revisable. But revision requires surviving long enough to make the argument.

The frame you are inside right now was built by someone. It can be rebuilt.

That is not comfort. But it is something.