“Inside and Outside” is mostly a story about how I don't like cockroaches. At the time I was writing it I thought it was a clever little metaphor for something else. But I was wrong, it's pretty much a story about how I don't like cockroaches.
Which is a respectable enough theme for a very short story, I guess. To be perfectly frank, “Inside and Outside” is probably the weakest story in The Invisible Woman and Other Stories. There's really not much to it beyond the dislike of cockroaches.
There is a hint of something a little more interesting, although I don't give it the attention I should in the story. The narrator repeats the phrase, “This is me and that's not me,” several times over the course of the tale. So you could say I was trying to say something about identity, especially when you get to the part about how cockroaches live off of human trash.
Which is the kind of horror I wanted to express when I was writing the story: the feeling of being repelled by this vermin, but then realizing that the vermin depends on you for its very existence. That we human beings may find cockroaches repulsive, but that we human beings also create the conditions that allow cockroaches to thrive. Which is a thought expressed in the story, but not quite with the level of revulsion and self-disgust I would have liked to apply.
Because this thought ties back into the narrator's struggles with personal identity: This is me and that's not me. What so disgusts the narrator, even more than the cockroaches themselves, is the thought that he can't fully bring himself to cease identifying with them. On the logic that if something only exists and sustains itself because of you, what line can you point to where you can say, “This separates us”?
And you might say that the narrator wouldn't be entertaining such thoughts if the narrator had a healthy and strong ego. Which is accurate enough. Healthy people don't obsess over cockroaches potentially crawling into their mouths or go around thinking the real cockroaches are us.
But for all that… it's not like the narrator doesn't have a point at all. The cockroach may be an unwanted guest feeding on our trash, but it's true that the cockroach wouldn't be here if it wasn't for us. It's as integral a part of a human-constructed world as our more exalted pets–our dogs, our horses, our pussycats.
All of which are some moderately interesting ideas, but to be honest they're more completely and succinctly described right here than they are in the story itself. I won't say the story’s not worth reading–among other reasons because it's only about three pages long. But any collection of eighteen stories is going to have one story that's the weakest, and in this case, it's “Inside and Outside.”
Which may be a bit of a letdown. But don't worry, because next week's post will be about what's quite possibly my favorite story in the collection.
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The Invisible Woman and Other Stories is available on Amazon.
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