Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones is both the name of the book and a phrase the narrator uses for himself when fear and writer’s block leave him feeling emptied out. Borrowed from a maxim that reduces even the finest fictional character to a “bag of bones,” the image turns a claim about fiction’s limits into a description of the narrator’s own despair.

The Literary Maxim

The phrase enters the narrator’s thoughts through Dennison Carville, a creative-writing teacher who had helped connect him with Harold Oblowski and had offered faint praise for Being Two. Carville attributed the maxim to Thomas Hardy, though the narrator suspects Carville may have invented it and borrowed Hardy’s name to make it seem weightier. He recognizes the tactic because he has used that sort of attribution himself.

As the narrator recalls it, Hardy’s supposed comparison sets the dullest living person against the most brilliantly drawn fictional character: beside lived humanity, even an accomplished character is only a “bag of bones.” The maxim casts fiction as an inherently inadequate imitation of life. Its bleakness lies not simply in judging a particular novel, but in declaring the novelist’s task futile from the outset.

From Critical Judgment to Self-Description

During the late summer, the narrator thinks increasingly about Carville’s saying as panic gathers in his body and his mind feels locked. The maxim seems to describe a situation in which effort might fail to improve anything even if it succeeds. Its abstract verdict about literary art becomes personally immediate: the narrator feels reduced to the very image the saying uses to diminish a fictional character.

The self-description belongs to a period of profound creative despair. The narrator fears he will never write again and calls the prospect a tragedy, coupling that fear with the comic, self-deprecating image of a writer felled by writer’s block. The joke does not cancel the distress; it gives the distress a sharp, rueful form. In this context, “bag of bones” names not a literal condition but a felt loss of creative vitality.

The Phrase and the Book

The phrase also gives the book its title, linking the narrator’s immediate sense of depletion to the novel’s larger concern with the limits of writing and representation. The maxim says that a written character cannot equal a living person; the narrator’s crisis makes that literary judgment part of his own experience. The title therefore holds together two related meanings: the inadequacy attributed to fictional characters and the narrator’s fear that his own imaginative life has been drained away.