The Story Of Our Lives
Read "The Story Of Our Lives" by Mark Strand, with a complete literary analysis exploring relationships, identity, storytelling, memory, self-consciousness, and Strand's metafictional vision of two people experiencing their lives as though they were characters trapped inside a written narrative.
The Story Of Our Lives by Mark Strand
1
We are reading the story of our lives
which takes place in a room.
The room looks out on a street.
There is no one there,
no sound of anything.
The tress are heavy with leaves,
the parked cars never move.
We keep turning the pages, hoping for something,
something like mercy or change,
a black line that would bind us
or keep us apart.
The way it is, it would seem
the book of our lives is empty.
The furniture in the room is never shifted,
and the rugs become darker each time
our shadows pass over them.
It is almost as if the room were the world.
We sit beside each other on the couch,
reading about the couch.
We say it is ideal.
It is ideal.
2
We are reading the story of our lives,
as though we were in it,
as though we had written it.
This comes up again and again.
In one of the chapters
I lean back and push the book aside
because the book says
it is what I am doing.
I lean back and begin to write about the book.
I write that I wish to move beyond the book.
Beyond my life into another life.
I put the pen down.
The book says: "He put the pen down
and turned and watched her reading
the part about herself falling in love."
The book is more accurate than we can imagine.
I lean back and watch you read
about the man across the street.
They built a house there,
and one day a man walked out of it.
You fell in love with him
because you knew that he would never visit you,
would never know you were waiting.
Night after night you would say
that he was like me.
I lean back and watch you grow older without me.
Sunlight falls on your silver hair.
The rugs, the furniture,
seem almost imaginary now.
"She continued to read.
She seemed to consider his absence
of no special importance,
as someone on a perfect day will consider
the weather a failure
because it did not change his mind."
You narrow your eyes.
You have the impulse to close the book
which describes my resistance:
how when I lean back I imagine
my life without you, imagine moving
into another life, another book.
It describes your dependence on desire,
how the momentary disclosures
of purpose make you afraid.
The book describes much more than it should.
It wants to divide us.
3
This morning I woke and believed
there was no more to to our lives
than the story of our lives.
When you disagreed, I pointed
to the place in the book where you disagreed.
You fell back to sleep and I began to read
those mysterious parts you used to guess at
while they were being written
and lose interest in after they became
part of the story.
In one of them cold dresses of moonlight
are draped over the chairs in a man's room.
He dreams of a woman whose dresses are lost,
who sits in a garden and waits.
She believes that love is a sacrifice.
The part describes her death
and she is never named,
which is one of the things
you could not stand about her.
A little later we learn
that the dreaming man lives
in the new house across the street.
This morning after you fell back to sleep
I began to turn the pages early in the book:
it was like dreaming of childhood,
so much seemed to vanish,
so much seemed to come to life again.
I did not know what to do.
The book said: "In those moments it was his book.
A bleak crown rested uneasily on his head.
He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord,
anxious in his own kingdom."
4
Before you woke
I read another part that described your absence
and told how you sleep to reverse
the progress of your life.
I was touched by my own loneliness as I read,
knowing that what I feel is often the crude
and unsuccessful form of a story
that may never be told.
"He wanted to see her naked and vulnerable,
to see her in the refuse, the discarded
plots of old dreams, the costumes and masks
of unattainable states.
It was as if he were drawn
irresistably to failure."
It was hard to keep reading.
I was tired and wanted to give up.
The book seemed aware of this.
It hinted at changing the subject.
I waited for you to wake not knowing
how long I waited,
and it seemed that I was no longer reading.
I heard the wind passing
like a stream of sighs
and I heard the shiver of leaves
in the trees outside the window.
It would be in the book.
Everything would be there.
I looked at your face
and I read the eyes, the nose, the mouth . . .
5
If only there were a perfect moment in the book;
if only we could live in that moment,
we could being the book again
as if we had not written it,
as if we were not in it.
But the dark approaches
to any page are too numerous
and the escapes are too narrow.
We read through the day.
Each page turning is like a candle
moving through the mind.
Each moment is like a hopeless cause.
If only we could stop reading.
"He never wanted to read another book
and she kept staring into the street.
The cars were still there,
the deep shade of trees covered them.
The shades were drawn in the new house.
Maybe the man who lived there,
the man she loved, was reading
the story of another life.
She imagine a bare parlor,
a cold fireplace, a man sitting
writing a letter to a woman
who has sacrificed her life for love."
If there were a perfect moment in the book,
it would be the last.
The book never discusses the causes of love.
It claims confusion is a necessary good.
It never explains. It only reveals.
6
The day goes on.
We study what we remember.
We look into the mirror across the room.
We cannot bear to be alone.
The book goes on.
"They became silent and did not know how to begin
the dialogue which was necessary.
It was words that created divisions in the first place,
that created loneliness.
They waited
they would turn the pages, hoping
something would happen.
They would patch up their lives in secret:
each defeat forgiven because it could not be tested,
each pain rewarded because it was unreal.
They did nothing."
7
The book will not survive.
We are the living proof of that.
It is dark outside, in the room it is darker.
I hear your breathing.
You are asking me if I am tired,
if I want to keep reading.
Yes, I am tired.
Yes, I want to keep reading.
I say yes to everything.
You cannot hear me.
"They sat beside each other on the couch.
They were the copies, the tired phantoms
of something they had been before.
The attitudes they took were jaded.
They stared into the book
and were horrified by their innocence,
their reluctance to give up.
They sat beside each other on the couch.
They were determined to accept the truth.
Whatever it was they would accept it.
The book would have to be written
and would have to be read.
They are the book and they are
nothing else.
The Story Of Our Lives Summary and Analysis
Mark Strand presents a married or intimate pair reading the story of their lives as though their existence were already fixed inside a book. The setting is spare and enclosed: a room, a street outside, a house across the way, and a recurring sense that the ordinary scene is both familiar and strangely unfinished. What begins as a quiet act of reading gradually becomes a meditation on how selfhood is shaped by narrative, memory, and the need to give form to experience. The couple keeps turning pages, but the pages seem to know them better than they know themselves.
As the poem progresses, the relationship between life and text becomes increasingly unstable. The "book" begins to anticipate actions, expose private feelings, and even describe what the readers are thinking as they read. That recursive structure creates a powerful tension: the characters seem trapped by the story, yet they also seem to create it through their own longing, fear, and attention. Love appears inseparable from absence, desire, and the wish to escape oneself, while the poem's repeated insistence on reading suggests that meaning can never be fully escaped, only revisited. By the end, Strand leaves readers with a bleak but lucid paradox: the lovers are both the makers of the story and its captive subjects.
Tone in The Story Of Our Lives
Strand's tone is calm, reflective, and quietly ironic, but it also carries a deep sadness beneath its measured surface. The poem sounds controlled and almost clinical at times, as if it is examining the mechanics of consciousness, yet the emotional atmosphere feels increasingly claustrophobic and mournful. Readers are left with a sense of intimacy shadowed by estrangement, as though the very attempt to understand a life makes that life harder to inhabit.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in The Story Of Our Lives
- Life as narrative - The poem treats human experience as something already shaped like a story, with events, memories, and emotions organized into a text that seems to precede the people living it.
- Love and separation - The relationship between the two figures is intimate, but it is marked by distance, projection, and the fear that affection may depend on absence rather than presence.
- Determinism versus freedom - The repeated sense that the book predicts or contains every gesture creates a struggle between the desire to choose a different life and the feeling of being written in advance.
- Self-consciousness - The poem turns inward again and again, showing how reflection can become a trap when a person begins to watch himself living instead of simply living.
- Loneliness - Even when the pair are together, the poem emphasizes isolation, silence, and the inability of language to fully bridge the gap between two minds.
- The limits of explanation - Strand suggests that love, memory, and identity resist neat interpretation; the book reveals much, but it never fully justifies or explains what it uncovers.
Literary Devices in The Story Of Our Lives
- Metafiction - The poem repeatedly refers to itself as a book being read, creating a layered effect in which the act of narration becomes part of the subject matter.
- Recursive structure - Events are described as already occurring in the book, which the characters then read, producing a loop that mirrors the poem's concern with repetition and entrapment.
- Personification - The book seems active and knowing, as if it can anticipate thoughts and shape outcomes, which gives the poem a haunted, controlling presence.
- Repetition - Phrases and situations recur throughout the poem, reinforcing the feeling of routine, fixation, and the difficulty of escaping one's pattern of thought.
- Imagery - The room, street, furniture, shadows, and changing light create a stark visual world that reflects emotional stillness and unease.
- Paradox - The poem holds opposites together, such as freedom and confinement, intimacy and isolation, or reading and living, without resolving them.
- Direct speech - Quoted passages from the book interrupt the poem's flow, blurring the line between the readers' lives and the narrative they are inside.
- Free verse - The open form suits the poem's unsettled logic, allowing thought to move in spirals rather than in a fixed, predictable pattern.
Symbolism in The Story Of Our Lives
- The book - The book symbolizes the shape of lived experience, but also the pressure of interpretation and the sense that identity may be fixed by narrative.
- The room - The room suggests the boundaries of the self and the closed interior world in which the couple tries to understand their lives.
- The street and the house across the street - These places stand for alternative lives, distance, and the unreachable possibilities that still influence desire.
- The couch - The couch symbolizes domestic stillness and shared routine, but also passivity in the face of life's unfolding story.
- Shadows and darkness - These images suggest passing time, emotional dimming, and the way memory and self-knowledge become less clear as the poem proceeds.
Historical Context of The Story Of Our Lives
Mark Strand is often associated with late twentieth-century American poetry that favors spare surfaces, philosophical questioning, and a willingness to blur the line between inner life and artistic form. His work frequently reflects a postmodern awareness of language as something that shapes reality rather than merely reporting it, and this poem fits that tendency through its self-referential design and its doubts about stable meaning.
The poem also belongs to a broader modern tradition in which domestic scenes become sites of metaphysical inquiry. Instead of presenting a clear lyric confession, it dramatizes consciousness as a process of reading, revising, and doubting. That approach places it near other poems and prose works that treat identity as unstable and narration as a force that both reveals and distorts experience.
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