The Shapes of Refugee Stories

Image taken from here

I just can't read them all. There are too many migrant-refugee books and not enough hours and not enough energies to read every friggin' one of 'em.

So, I take a deep breath....and Google stuff...

If you've never taken a gander at Kurt Vonnegut's The Shapes of Stories thesis-that-never-was, now would be a good time to take one:


See larger, readable-version here
(Note: an Atlantic article mentions other popular story forms such as "Oedipus" and "Rags to Riches", and further explains that "Man in Hole" is the one story that no one ever seems to get tired of.)

Now, that you've perused over that, let's dig into refugee stories. I'm researching refugee stories for my new book (see Vallen label) and I'm finding that a lot of them have some similar shapes—Vonnegut-style plot shapes, that is.

Take Thanhha Lai's free-verse novel Inside Out and Back Again, a story about a refugee girl learning to live a new life in Alabama. Just from voraciously gleaning the reviews and comments on the linked Goodreads article (or Amazon reviews or whatever I can manage to find), I can get a general gist of the story and (scanning for those ***spoiler warning*** parts) usually determine how the novel ends. 

That's all I need to map the story shape of refugee novels...

Okay, now...I might be biased and totally, horrendously uninformed (because I didn't even read these books, though I should and want to), but...

Is Man-in-Hole the most popular story shape here? 

That conclusion appears inline with what I've already heard about Man-in-Hole: it's one of the most popular story shapes across time. I'm also noticing that books aimed at children or that have an alternative form (like a graphic novel), will tend to follow a more traditional story shape, like Man-in-Hole or Cinderella. Whereas literary fiction novels will delve into Which-Way-is-Up territory, which is more morally ambiguous. 

I also noticed a trend of: refugee-escaping-to-Western-country-only-to-find-said-Western-country's-streets-are-NOT-paved-in-gold. This is similar to An American Tail and Book of Exodus and other popular migrant-refugee stories. These stories tend to follow a familiar shape: 
  1. Start in Home-Country
  2. Home-Country is inhospitable, becoming a terrible place
  3. Harrowing Escape and Trials to reach New-Country 
  4. Struggle to Acclimate to New-Country / Face Animosity 
  5. Successfully Acclimate, Learn to Live in New-Home (achieve Promised Land)
I hope to use this research to help rescope and rewrite the ending of my own draft novel, The Vallen, and maybe you will find it useful too. 

Comments? 



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