Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang

“I’d love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance.” [p. 1]

The beginning of the story sets up the narrative style, first person perspective of a mother telling a story. The way the story is written is as if she is telling a bedtime story to her daughter, or on a deathbed. The title of the story, “Story of Your Life,” and the way the narrator starts with the story of the day her daughter was conceived, I think implies that this story somehow relates to the story of the narrator’s daughter in the narrator’s perspective, although I have no idea how that actually will work out except when the narrator is telling stories of her life before the aliens visited. Initially I thought that the narrator has already died or was dying, but it seems that it was the daughter who died-from the passage later when the narrator talks about saying “that’s her” at a suspiciously hospital like setting. I somehow get the feeling that the daughter was somehow killed in an accident/incident involving the aliens, but maybe the “you” of the “Story of Your Life” has nothing to do with the daughter.

Another narrating style that interests me is the way the narrator alternates stories between the story of her daughter and the story of her encounter with the aliens. The only correlation between the two alternating story seems to be the way they use language. We can see the daughter speaking and the mother figuring out what she means through context, such as the “made of honor” while also figuring out the alien language through context, such finding out their written structure. Perhaps the “you” in the title is both the daughter and the aliens, hence the alternating narrative style.