"The cruelest thing you can do," Hamlet writes in his dime-store
notebook, "is name a child Hamlet.
  "Our lives are littered with the kind of random misfortune we like to
call tragedy.  Each of us imagines himself the center of some drama,
something with a plot -- unknown to us -- but a plot nonetheless:
something with beginning, middle, and end, something that defines the
direction and progression of whatever it is we're supposed to be doing.
We fool ourselves into thinking our lives match plots we know from
fiction and history.
  "And when things move slowly, or not at all, we feel anxious.  Stories
are life distilled -- or life is stories diluted.  We have been poisoned
with the notion that things progress, that conflicts are resolved, that
people change.  When none of these things is happening we wonder if
we've been left out of the story, written off the page.  Why hasn't she
called?  Why doesn't he write?
  "We submit to being characters in the stories of others so that we can
use them as characters in our own story."
  He sits on the closed toilet balancing the notebook on the edge of the
sink.  He writes quickly, unevenly, and then stops to think.  He takes a
face towel and wipes the sweat from his forehead.  Downstairs the
reception for his father's funeral is in full swing.