{"id":167256,"date":"2024-04-10T10:41:47","date_gmt":"2024-04-10T14:41:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167256"},"modified":"2024-04-11T10:20:48","modified_gmt":"2024-04-11T14:20:48","slug":"the-rejection-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/04\/10\/the-rejection-plot\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rejection Plot"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Print from Trouble<\/em>, by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review<\/em> in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue.<\/p><\/div>\n

Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it\u2019s second-rate\u2014all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs\u2014the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief\u2014rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question\u2014Will they or won\u2019t they?\u2014<\/em>the rejection plot spoils everything upfront: they won\u2019t. There the story stalls; but, strangely, continues. Even with no hope of requital, desire can persist, even intensify, with no guarantee of ending. The lack of happening is the tragedy.<\/p>\n

Rejection isn\u2019t the same as heartbreak, which entails a past acceptance. A rejection implies that you don\u2019t even warrant a try. From the reject\u2019s perspective, the reciprocity of heartbreak looks pretty appealing. And if you\u2019re going to suffer, it may as well be exciting. Who would choose the flat desolation of rejection over rough-and-tumble drama, especially if they end the same way? The clich\u00e9\u2014tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all\u2014<\/em>is comforting to the heartbroken, but damning to the rejected. No matter how unpleasant or unequal, a breakup is at least something you share with someone else. Rejection makes only one reject. \u201cUnrequited love does not die,\u201d writes Elle Newmark in The Book of Unholy Mischief<\/em>, \u201cit\u2019s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.\u201d A story that begins with closure can never end.<\/p>\n

The basic plot of rejection is simple. First comes the yearning, where \u201cby the successive inventions of his desires, his regrets, his disappointments, and his projects, the lover constructs an entire novel around a woman he does not know,\u201d as Proust writes. Eventually you make a proposition and are declined. You may try again, but only the same happens\u2014nothing.<\/p>\n

What science has to say about rejection is mostly what everyone already knows: it\u2019s real and it hurts. In an fMRI study researcher Naomi Eisenberger demonstrated that being rejected lights up the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that deals with physical pain, with a corresponding release of dopamine and cortisol. The social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dawn Dhavale\u2019s study \u201cTwo Sides of Romantic Rejection,\u201d typical of much writing in their field, spells out common sense to a point of absurd rigor (they note that \u201cit is better to be intelligent and beautiful than stupid and ugly\u201d). They define romantic rejection as a situation in which \u201ca person refuses the romantic advances of another, ignores \/ avoids or is repulsed by someone who is romantically interested in them, or unilaterally ends an existing relationship.\u201d The measure of rejection is the \u201cdiscrepancy between desired and perceived relational evaluation,\u201d which is \u201cthe degree to which a person regards his or her relationship with another individual as valuable, important, or close\u201d\u2014in other words, you want your relationship to matter to the other person more than it does. Certain categories of people are more likely to be rejected: those considered \u201cdangerous, having little to offer, as exploitative, or rejecting of us.\u201d And the leading cause of rejection, they argue, is hypergamy: desiring people more desirable than oneself.<\/p>\n

Most notably, they observe that \u201cthe culture has not provided them with good, effective scripts for rejecting love,\u201d causing them to experience \u201ca pervasive sense of scriptlessness.\u201d Rejectors have their prefab lines (\u201cIt\u2019s not you, it\u2019s me,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not dating right now,\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re not a good match\u201d), but rejects don\u2019t. What is there to say, after all?<\/p>\n

To whatever extent the mind is a part of nature, it too abhors a vacuum. Just as infatuation drives you to project intimate fantasies onto strangers, the blank slate of rejection, the lack of a script, invites you to devise an elaborate narrative about why you were rejected, and what that says about you. But even stronger than the temptation to dwell in the past (what might have happened) or dread the future (what won\u2019t be) is the urge to wallow in an eternal present. Your life can\u2019t move forward, so it moves sideways, to a parallel reality. At parties you imagine the date you didn\u2019t bring, then go home to share your bed with a ghost. Absence becomes the realest thing in your world. So the true rejection plot is the one the reject devises in the absence of a plot.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Narrative is a way of giving not only shape and coherence to chaos, but progress and closure; its absence creates a feeling of endless languishing. For this reason one often sees rejection described as halting time, as Miss Havisham orders every clock stopped at the precise minute she was left at the altar, wallows in her moldering wedding clothes, and makes Estella and Pip reenact the romance that ended with her stood up at the altar. (\u201cI sometimes have sick fancies,\u201d she tells Pip, \u201cand I have a sick fancy that I want to see some play.\u201d) In Cut Loose, <\/em>Helen Fisher quotes an anonymous eighth-century Japanese poet who writes, \u201cMy longing has no time when it ceases\u201d; the men of Papua New Guinea\u2019s Sepik River province who\u2019ve had their marriage offers rejected compose songs describing the marriages that could have been.<\/p>\n

In this way, the true object of your fixation may not be your rejector, but rather the fantasy devised in the process of yearning. The perfection of this fantasy makes it hard to give up. (Proust: \u201cWhat is necessary is the risk\u2014which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person\u2014of an impossibility.\u201d) Your secret hope is to become Pygmalion, convinced that your desire can somehow be made real through sheer agonizing persistence. Pygmalion, it\u2019s worth remembering, is disgusted by real women (\u201cdismayed by the numerous defects \/ of character Nature had given the feminine spirit, \/ stayed as a bachelor, having no female companion\u201d) and only loves the one he creates by his own hand.<\/p>\n

Devotion\u2014putting someone in an exalted position, as Pygmalion places Galatea, on a literal pedestal\u2014feels like empathy, in their shared sense of understanding someone deeply, but is actually the opposite. When wishful thinking becomes confused with reality, the real person vanishes, as does the entire world around that person. The thing you\u2019ve been denied is always perfect. In \u201cTo a Magazine,\u201d Mary Ruefle writes, \u201cthe rejected know another knowledge\u2014that if they were not rejected, heaven would descend upon the earth in earthly dreams [\u2026] The rejected know if they were nonrejected a clear cerulean blue would be the result, an endless love ever dissolving in more endless love.\u201d For all their power over the nature of your imagined reality, it can feel as if the rejector is a divinity of sorts\u2014Borges writes, \u201cTo fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god,\u201d noting also that Beatrice had rejected Dante in life (\u201cInfinitely Beatrice existed for Dante; Dante existed very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice. Our piety, our veneration cause us to forget that pitiful inharmony, which was unforgettable for Dante\u201d). And so in his own poem he makes Beatrice the immortal docent of Heaven, a place he doesn\u2019t belong. One is only rejected from Heaven, never Hell.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The rejection plot usually peters out, as over time the wound becomes less interesting and meaningful. But this isn\u2019t always the case; what if they change their mind? What if you can help<\/em> them change their mind? Such hope is often toxic, but not always unwarranted. Everyone has heard of a case where someone\u2019s ill-advised, ethically dubious persistence paid off\u2014He just wore me down!<\/em>\u2014which means you can never fully convince yourself that any rejection is truly final. (\u201cIn a surprising minority of cases,\u201d write Baumeister and Dhavale in their study on rejection, \u201cstalkers eventually become the romantic partners of the people they have stalked.\u201d)<\/p>\n

And so another way of answering rejection is to be willfully oblivious: to reject rejection, through sheer gumption or delusion. Pride and Prejudice<\/em> is full of rejections issued and ignored, preemptive and rescinded. When the arrogant Mr. Collins receives Elizabeth\u2019s firm refusal of his marriage proposal, he tells her:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI am not now to learn,\u201d replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, \u201cthat it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He later adds, \u201cAs I must, therefore, conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not taking the hint is a strategy of attrition; keeping the proposition on the table indefinitely, you hope, will increase your odds. Since you can\u2019t just switch off your feelings for someone, you hold out for the unlikely reversal, even at the expense of your well-being. The fact that this is possible (which is not to say wise, ethical, or appropriate) permits the reject to believe against all evidence that a mistake has been made, that everything could work out if enough of an effort is made. The reject haggles, disputes, demands to know why, tries to poke holes in something that isn\u2019t an argument, until eventually he turns into something uglier: the creep. For its ability to repulse and coerce, creepiness can be a strange form of power, one perhaps even unsought by the one who wields it, since it can feel more like powerlessness. But no one said power always feels good.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

One of the oddest stories of rejection in the internet age was authored spontaneously by dozens of people. Known informally as \u201cThe Saga of Denko,\u201d it began in 2011 with a post on the anonymous Japanese message board 2channel (#OP is the original poster, and #2ch are his responders):<\/p>\n

\n

[Help!] The Girl I Like Won\u2019t Respond to My Emails (\u00b4\u00b7\u03c9\u00b7`)<\/strong><\/p>\n

#OP <\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s this girl I\u2019ve had feelings for since high school, and now we\u2019re in college together. We\u2019ll call her Denko.<\/p>\n

Once we hit second year, we went out drinking, and I worked up the courage to exchange numbers.<\/p>\n

We started out talking often, but she hasn\u2019t answered me in three days now.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m getting depressed just thinking that Denko might be sick, or that something happened to her\u2026 (\u00b4\uff65\u03c9\uff65`)<\/p>\n

Please, somebody give me some advice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At first the reactions #OP gets range from earnest to mocking, until he reveals that he has been emailing her six hundred times a day with no response, at which point the board begins heckling him; #OP keeps asking for advice anyway. Across five threads totaling over 18,000 words in the English translation, #OP reveals himself by turns to be a guilelessly deluded, obsessive stalker. Convinced that Denko secretly likes him but won\u2019t admit it, he interprets everything as encouragement, never questioning his own motives or Denko\u2019s interest. By his own account, he begins calling her at home, then visiting her house to look for her. When she emails him to tell him to stop emailing her, and threatens to call the police, he wonders if she\u2019s testing him, or if her mother put her up to it.<\/p>\n

From this point on, the community\u2019s tone shifts from jeering to morbid fascination: several try to egg him on further, suggesting he keep trying, or stuff thirty hamsters in a box and send them to her. Some try in good faith to shout above the noise and get him to see his own delusion, or convince him of Denko\u2019s obvious lack of interest; in others, it\u2019s less clear whether he\u2019s being mocked, or defended by someone equally deluded:<\/p>\n

\n

#2ch <\/strong><\/p>\n

Screw you guys. OP\u2019s persistence should be COMMENDED.<\/p>\n

Sending massive amounts of emails out of worry!<\/p>\n

Buying clothes to improve his appearance!<\/p>\n

And I say try even harder!<\/p>\n

Send 1000 emails a day!<\/p>\n

Girls love men who worry about them!<\/p>\n

#2ch <\/strong><\/p>\n

I know I\u2019D hate you.<\/p>\n

#2ch <\/strong><\/p>\n

Serious post here.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t get a reply after three times, stop.<\/p>\n

If she\u2019s making excuses about work and busyness, she really doesn\u2019t like you.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s only not saying it because she thinks it would hurt you.<\/p>\n

Denko getting 600 emails from a guy who isn\u2019t even her boyfriend is no doubt going to scare her.<\/p>\n

But she\u2019s probably a nice girl if she isn\u2019t admitting it.<\/p>\n

There are people out there who just can\u2019t be blunt.<\/p>\n

So stop it, please.<\/p>\n

#2ch <\/strong><\/p>\n

Even from a boyfriend, 600 emails in three days is scary.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

#OP maintains his obliviousness, acknowledging the bullying replies with polite befuddlement, and he eventually shares an email that he sends to Denko:<\/p>\n

\n

#OP <\/strong><\/p>\n

Subject: This Is How I Feel<\/p>\n

Contents:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry for making you worry.<\/p>\n

I would never consider killing or raping you, Denko, so don\u2019t worry. Is that what you thought I would do?<\/p>\n

Now, I want you to take what I\u2019m saying seriously.<\/p>\n

I really, truly love you, Denko.<\/p>\n

I think I would be willing to die for you, Denko.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been trying to ensure your happiness first.<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t think my feelings for you will ever change.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very unfortunate things got like this right after we started dating, but we can start over.<\/p>\n

That would be great, wouldn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Remember what I said when I confessed to you?<\/p>\n

I still feel the way I did back then\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After nearly a month of these posts, OP signs off, the end of his saga inconclusive. As it often goes with internet folklore, the story\u2019s provenance has become disputed. It\u2019s not clear whether #OP was as guileless as he acted\u2014the story\u2019s coherence, and his willingness to ignore and carry on against overwhelming opprobrium, is highly suspect, and the post\u2019s translator also unearthed a post from three weeks earlier by someone who used the same \u201c(\u00b4\uff65\u03c9\uff65`)\u201d kaomoji, claiming that he\u2019d sent six hundred emails to see if his crush was safe after an earthquake. It\u2019s also possible #OP posed as some of his own hecklers.<\/p>\n

Suppose this is the case\u2014that it was a social experiment, a fictional story designed to elucidate something about rejection communally. Ordinarily the goal of trolling is to either make people angry, expose their gullibility, or draw out their ugly qualities. But mixed in with the trolls are attempts to communicate or commiserate with the hapless #OP; rather than ragebait, he managed to make empathybait, curiositybait. Here we are, contemplating him now. Can attention be a form of acceptance?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

There may be no good way to accept rejection, but there are many terrible ways, and frustration often makes a turn toward anger. A 2015 article in The Cut<\/em>, \u201cIs There Any Right Way to Reject a Guy?<\/a>,\u201d describes an incident with Ben Schoen, the former host of a popular Harry Potter podcast. It began with Schoen sending flirtatious Twitter DMs to the BuzzFeed writer Grace Spelman; when Spelman didn\u2019t reply, he took to Facebook (where seven years earlier, as a fourteen-year-old Harry Potter fan, Spelman had added him as a friend) and sent her a series of DMs:<\/p>\n

\n

Grace you do a remarkable job of making your personality shine through online<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hyperactively beautiful<\/p>\n

And you seem really introspective<\/p>\n

So what I\u2019m saying here is you wanna get married at one of those drive thru places<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t handle such spontaneity I understand how I might be getting ahead of myself<\/p>\n

I\u2019m starting a new podcast I would love for you to listen and if you like it I would love having you on an episode<\/p>\n

You had me when you posted that Kendrick Lamar vid<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I realized you are probably definitely a special soul (aka \u201cthe one\u201d) \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

That smile emoji was unintentionally creepy<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s interesting to observe how, consciously or not, the messages are crafted to preempt rejection. Though obviously motivated by sincere attraction, they move from over-the-top flattery (\u201chyperactively beautiful\u201d) to facetious flirtation (\u201cwanna get married\u201d) that is intended to soften the pitch, so it can be played off as a joke if it fails. He then nods at the possibility of rejection (\u201cI might be getting ahead of myself\u201d), while implying that the only reason she might reject him is because she \u201ccan\u2019t handle such spontaneity\u201d\u2014her fault, not his. The proposition is garnished with a career opportunity, followed by more hyperbolic flattery and self-deprecation.<\/p>\n

Spelman let Schoen down easy, leavening her response with the type of exclamation points one might use in a work email: \u201cHi Ben! Thank you for the kind words but I actually have a boyfriend! Hope you stay well!\u201d She then unfriended him on Facebook and blocked him on Twitter.<\/p>\n

Soon after, Schoen flung insults at Spelman publicly on Twitter:<\/p>\n

\n

just bc you work at Buzzfeed doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re good. Good luck finding meaning in all that garbage you call content<\/p>\n

and u don\u2019t even have the fortitude to tell me to fuck off? You have 10,000 followers bc of a good profile pic + listicles<\/p>\n

the way you ghosted me was immature and insulting. I Messaged you to make u laugh nothing more<\/p>\n

before you 86 someone maybe you should use your intellect and see if the person could be useful to your career?<\/p>\n

it\u2019s funny. You delete me off Facebook when I was about to offer you a job at a company in NY that pays at least double \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the reverse-polarity of rejection, every quality he previously flattered her for is now wielded against her. If before she was \u201cbeautiful,\u201d now she is nothing but \u201ca good profile pic.\u201d Her introspection is recast as rude and immature; having once praised her online content, now he uses it to trivialize her. He accuses her of lacking the \u201cfortitude\u201d to reject him properly, even though clearly stating your unavailability is a classically proper rejection. Any implication that his podcast offer was a veiled quid pro quo is now made explicit as a playground taunt: I was gonna give you something cool, but now I\u2019m not gonna.<\/p>\n

In the article, Spelman assessed Schoen\u2019s response frankly: \u201cYou can\u2019t win in these types of situations. Even if you are polite in your rejection, they\u2019ll demand that you tell them WHY you did it. It\u2019s just a mixture of entitlement and the fragility of the ego.\u201d True enough; the demand for an explanation stems from a hope that the rejector can be somehow proven wrong. But except in rare cases of misunderstanding\u2014the Mr. Darcy kind, far rarer than any reject would like to believe\u2014the rejector is always right. If someone isn\u2019t attracted to you, that\u2019s neither their choice nor your business. And however convinced you may be that someone would be happier if they accepted your affections, their happiness is still their prerogative, and they aren\u2019t obligated to let you prove otherwise. In fact, nobody is obligated to love anybody; it isn\u2019t even possible to put anyone under those obligations, and as convenient as it would be if love were rational, it has no criterion other than whether it is felt. Love, we must repeat, is a matter of taste, and so cannot be disputed.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In Miss Manners\u2019 Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior <\/em>(1982),<\/em> Judith Martin offers a pragmatic path to solace:<\/p>\n

\n

The rejectee\u2019s first duty (and only available pleasure) is to turn down any such offer [of consolation or friendship]. One ought to reply, as the Republican Party is said to have done to Mr. Nixon when he offered to help with the 1976 election, \u201cThank you, but I think you\u2019ve done enough already.\u201d<\/p>\n

The smartest thing a dumped one can do is to get out of sight, or at least to hide all traces of misery. This is not easy to do, but it is one of those rare instances in which the hardest work brings the greatest chance of success.<\/p>\n

Success, in this case, must be defined as making the other person suffer as much as oneself \u2026 Such suffering is never caused by see-how-miserable-you-made-me-feel. It is caused, as the rejectee ought to know, by the realization that a person who used to love you doesn\u2019t any longer. Thus, the proper behavior for someone whose heart is breaking is to be cheerful, not pained; ungrudgingly forgiving, not accusing; busy, not free to be comforted; mysterious, not willing to talk the situation over; absent, not obviously alone or overdoing attentions to others.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here Martin plays the astute friend who, to avoid condescending to you, doesn\u2019t try to minimize your pain. Instead she validates your desire for revenge, framing your rejector\u2019s suffering as the \u201conly available pleasure.\u201d It\u2019s a shame, then, her basic assumption\u2014that rejectors suffer most when you move on\u2014is plainly untrue. Rejectors, obviously, want you to forgive and forget, fast. Which means if you really wanted to make them suffer, you\u2019d apply yourself single-mindedly to \u201csee-how-miserable-you-made-me-feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

So while the classy, healthy, and ethical thing to do is move on, what would truly please you, following Martin\u2019s logic, is revenge. As we\u2019re told that you can only hurt the ones you love, the capacity to wound even furnishes proof of that love. Certainly this comes at the cost of their affection, but what can they do, reject you again? This might explain why, in lieu of love, certain desperates will fashion from rejection a different plot. They seek a bond that\u2014like the idealized, imagined love they\u2019ve lost\u2014is exclusive and permanent: the bond of death, which has its own clich\u00e9: If I can\u2019t have you, nobody will.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In the revenge plot, both in literature and life, a woman\u2019s life is often forfeit. Roderigo, turned down by Desdemona, and Iago, passed over for a promotion, conspire to manipulate Othello into murdering Desdemona. Phaedra, spurned by Hippolytus, kills herself and frames him for it, leading to his death. In The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>, Elder Zosima tells the story of a friend who in his youth killed a woman who rejected him, got away with it, and only years later confesses his crime. Even when Goethe\u2019s Werther takes his own life after being rejected by Charlotte and the Weimar nobility, it\u2019s mentioned in passing that \u201cCharlotte\u2019s life was despaired of.\u201d (Not just hers\u2014the book spawned an outbreak of real-world copycat suicides.)<\/p>\n

Hannah Arendt called loneliness \u201cthe common ground for terror\u201d\u2014the double entendre being common<\/em>. An analysis of fifteen mass shootings between 1995 and 2001 found that at least six perpetrators had \u201cexperienced a recent romantic rejection\u201d; 97 percent of all 197 American mass shootings since 1966 were committed by men, and 46 percent of mass shootings between 2015 to 2022 targeted current or former romantic partners or family members. In The Bully Society<\/em>, Jessie Klein writes that \u201cin at least twenty-three school shootings, the perpetrators\u2019 stated motives related to relationship stresses: rejection, jealousy, a desire to protect girls, or frustration or perceived failure with girls,\u201d suggesting that the killers considered \u201ctheir responses more understandable and perhaps even justified.\u201d The mass shooters George Sodini, George Hennard, Marc L\u00e9pine, and Elliot Rodger all explicitly cited their rejection by, and hatred of, women as their casus belli;<\/em> the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-hui Cho had been reported for stalking female students; the Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza wrote an essay about \u201cwhy females are inherently selfish.\u201d The Columbine shooter Eric Harris had been turned down by a girl he\u2019d asked to prom three days before the massacre; high schoolers Luke Woodham, Michael Carneal, Kip Kinkel, Andrew Wurst, Mitchell Johnson, and Jaylen Fryberg also retaliated against rejections. Six-year-old Dedrick Owens shot a girl his own age after she rejected him for a kiss.<\/p>\n

How does something as immaterial as rejection enlarge and solidify in the mind, until murder seems like a fair response? Perhaps because, while rejection itself can be light, the intensity of the feelings it evokes is not, fueled by the reject\u2019s limitless counterfactual imaginings. Since its outcomes are total, the intentions behind them feel equally total, so \u201cI don\u2019t like you in that way\u201d is heard as \u201cI despise you.\u201d When a rejection gets construed as an attack, the temptation is to fight back, accuse them of assuming the worst about you, repay the insult, or demean the rejector to invalidate their rejection. You assume they have dismissed you out of active hatred, even though rejections can happen out of fleeting mood, circumstance, indecision, busyness, romantic orientation, or forgetfulness. Even when they do dislike you, it\u2019s not always personal; as in cases of bigotry, it can stem from the rejector\u2019s shortcomings rather than your own. (Sometimes, though, the problem really is you.)<\/p>\n

The blankness of the rejection plot may be the crux. It feels absurd to be so undone by nothing; only by reconceiving your rejection as a top-tier catastrophe, a special torment with life-or-death stakes, does the suffering feel proportionate. So neglect becomes crucifixion, wound-licking is justice, disrespect is death, and rejection by one is rejection by all. By causing real suffering and death, the killer wants to assert the reality and intensity of the pain it emerged from. And since rejection lacks its own narrative, it co-opts others\u2014not just their plot, but their style. To quote another famously heartsick homicidaire<\/em>, you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style\u2014and you can count on a mass killer for an overwrought one. The killers\u2019 fantasies of revenge dwarf even their actual deeds. In his manifesto, Elliot Rodger envisions \u201ca fair and pure world\u201d in which women are rounded up in concentration camps and \u201cdeliberately starved to death.\u201d In his videos he declares that he will turn everyone into \u201cmountains of skulls and rivers of blood,\u201d just as Seung-hui Cho announces that he will cause \u201cmillions of deaths and millions of gallons of blood on the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n

It used to be that the bogeyman of popular imagination was the serial killer, whose archetype was often surprisingly charming or sociable: Ted Bundy, Paul Knowles (the \u201cCasanova Killer\u201d), John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer; or their fictional progeny, the compassionate Dexter Morgan, erudite Hannibal Lecter, smoldering Paul Spector. With something like a diabolical humanism, this archetype kills for pleasure, relishing each one. These have been supplanted<\/a> by the newer archetype of the mass shooter, or parallel killer\u2014an antisocial reject who wants to get it all out at once, acting out of imagined justice rather than pleasure. In their parallel worlds, all is permitted and possible, and the reject is god. Seung-hui Cho: \u201cI die, like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the Weak and Defenseless people.\u201d (Cho also told his roommate that he had a girlfriend from outer space named Jelly.) Elliot Rodger: \u201cI\u2019ll be a god, exacting my retribution on all those who deserve it.\u201d Describing himself as \u201cone who always loved fantasy and magic, and who always wished that such things were real,\u201d Rodger was a fan of The Secret<\/em>, a superstitious self-help book about getting things you want, like Pygmalion, simply by wanting them hard enough.<\/p>\n

In 2015, a bow-tie designer named Tyrell Shaw went on a daylong spree in Manhattan, striking Asian women in the face with a blunt object in four separate incidents, before hanging himself. \u201cI\u2019ve been rejected by Women my entire life,\u201d his blog begins. \u201cI never agreed with violence, but I knew the only way I could overcome that sense of rejection-would start by assaulting the women that carelessly rejected me.\u201d (But he had propositioned them just as carelessly: elsewhere he claimed to have complimented a hundred Asian women in one day, listing the exact time of each compliment.) \u201cI realized that I would have to use violence in order get the response that I desire,\u201d he later continued. \u201cBy starting an independent civil war where I will hit over a million Asian Women in the face with a stick will change history.\u201d<\/p>\n

The delusion of consequence, and of one\u2019s vengeance serving a higher purpose, speaks to the malleability of the rejection plot: it feels very bad, so it can\u2019t mean nothing, and since you want it to mean something, and it could mean anything, it\u2019s got to mean everything<\/em>. Because the rejection plot has no closure of its own, the thoughts and desires can only be discharged by forcing something to happen. And so a new script emerges for others to act out, achieving deadly closure. Shooters explicitly copying Elliot Rodger include Christopher Harper-Mercer, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, Alek Minassian, and Keshav Bhide, who, a month after Rodger\u2019s massacre, declared on YouTube: \u201cI am the next Elliot Rodger and guess what I\u2019ll do the right thing this time.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

There is one other surefire way to end a story that doesn\u2019t progress, and that is to stop reading it (or writing it). Those who feel patronized by hope, have had enough of languishing, and don\u2019t err into vengeance, may contemplate opting out of love altogether. But when being loved is ubiquitously understood as the sine qua non <\/em>of fulfillment, no one gives it up willingly. The problem is, we like love, we love to yearn, we cherish the hope and payoff of grand ambitions realized, we want to want to want. A hero is not supposed to quit.<\/p>\n

The parallel killer is a descendant of Dostoyevsky\u2019s Underground Man: an outcast narcissistically reveling in self-laceration and offense, rejected by society. We may pity him, but we can only root for him insofar as we relate to his feelings.<\/p>\n

Do other scripts exist? Is there a plot in which the reject is somehow heroic, by dint of his rejection? We see some novels where the protagonists forebear their loneliness with admirable lightness, like Mildred Lathbury in Barbara Pym\u2019s Excellent Women<\/em>, who suffers the condescension of her married peers with self-deprecating charm\u2014though this is undercut by the fact that in later novels, she winds up married.<\/p>\n

Another novel begins with the same premises but arrives at different conclusions\u2014its protagonist is a lonely, isolated wretch awash in self-pity, living a plotless life in which nothing ever happens:<\/p>\n

\n

Others have someone who is devoted to them. I\u2019ve never had someone who even considered devoting themselves to me. That is for others: me, they just treat decently.<\/p>\n

I recognize in myself the capacity to arouse respect but not affection. Unfortunately I\u2019ve done nothing that in itself justifies that initial respect and so no one has ever managed to fully respect me either.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In him we recognize the reject\u2019s self-loathing and resentment:<\/p>\n

\n

Other people of lesser intelligence are in fact much stronger than me. They are better than I am at carving out their lives amongst other people, more skilled at administering their intelligence. I have all the necessary qualities to influence others but not the art with which to do so, nor even the will to want to do so.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

His preference for fiction over reality:<\/p>\n

\n

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I\u2019ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as \u201cflesh and blood.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Frustration with his stagnant, meaningless life:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ve done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence. The part of my life not wasted in thinking up confused interpretations of nothing at all, has been spent making prose poems out of the incommunicable feelings I use to make the unknown universe my own. Both objectively and subjectively speaking, I\u2019m sick of myself. I\u2019m sick of everything, and of everything about everything.<\/p>\n

Hope? What have I got to hope for? The only promise the day holds for me is that it will just be another day with a fixed course to run and a conclusion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lamenting about his Godless existence:<\/p>\n

\n

No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Framing his desire as a matter of mortal consequence:<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s enough for me to want something for that thing to die. My destiny, however, is not powerful enough to prove deadly to just anything. It has the unfortunate disadvantage of being deadly to only those things I want.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He even calls his writings \u201cconfessions,\u201d as if being rejected is a state of sin or crime. This is Bernardo Soares, one of Fernando Pessoa\u2019s heteronyms, in his posthumous and unedited novel The Book of Disquiet<\/em>. Presented as diary entries, the faceless office drone Soares is capable of deep perception, gentleness, and self-knowledge, but is no less a reject, with all its hallmarks. He lives an airless life with a deep relationship to fantasy (\u201cIn my case the two realities I attend to have equal weight\u201d), and he\u2019s prone to cosmically grandiose proclamations about himself, though with a self-effacing twist: \u201cI am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am the center that exists only because every circle has one \u2026 I am the center of everything surrounded by the great nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Miss Havisham, Mr. Collins, #OP, or Roderigo\u2014unlike Sodini, Cho, or Rodger\u2014Soares not only radically accepts his condition but aestheticizes it. For him the blankness of rejection is a canvas: \u201cBecause I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn\u2019t be able to.\u201d While a bookkeeper could imagine himself as anyone, he argues, the King of England can\u2019t, because \u201chis reality limits what he can feel.\u201d Instead of trying to bring his parallel life in line with his real one, he rejects both: \u201cI reject life because it is a prison sentence, I reject dreams as being a vulgar form of escape.\u201d His conviction is that the world\u2019s beauty and perfection are located in its very unattainability. His parallel world stays parallel, because if he were not rejected, if he got what he wanted, perfection wouldn\u2019t exist at all, and life would mean less: \u201cWe worship perfection because we can\u2019t have it; if we had it, we would reject it.\u201d<\/p>\n

What one might call heroic is Soares\u2019s success in finding a different perspective on the dogma of love. And not with the kind of delusional spite that degrades love, but actually appreciates it:<\/p>\n

\n

It is not love itself but the outskirts of love that matter \u2026 The sublimation of love illuminates the phenomena of love much more clearly than the actual experience of it. There are some very wise virgins in the world. Action has its compensations but it confuses the matter. To possess is to be possessed and therefore to lose oneself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This idea that love can only be truly appreciated from the outside may feel like sour grapes, like the purest cope, but where does that feeling come from? Of course everyone wants love; still, consider how often lovers say their beloved completes them, and they can\u2019t live without them, and so on. If the price of love is losing yourself in another, then accepting unrequital is a special kind of self-knowledge, one that does not pretend that acceptance comes with any greater reward. Even if everyone would prefer the fulfillments of love, that doesn\u2019t negate the virtue of its absence. Whether you wanted this virtue or not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tony Tulathimutte is the author of<\/em> Private Citizens. Rejection is forthcoming in September 2024<\/em>.\u00a0He is the founder of CRIT, a writing class in Brooklyn. His story “Ahegao<\/a>” appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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