“The Honest Island”
by Greg Jackson
from the November 11, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
I only know Greg Jackson through his short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker, which I have really liked. They often deal with a lost narrator (and, looking ahead at this week’s story, he might be on theme in “The Honest Island”). He has a story collection out called Prodigals, and his debut novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, came out last year. Has anyone read it? I’d love to know more about it!
Here is how “The Honest Island” starts:
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come. He had ransacked his mind but he could not remember and he could not recall many other things besides. The period before his arrival, for instance. He knew he came from elsewhere. His appearance made that abundantly clear, and he did not speak the islanders’ language, although between gestures and the few words of his own language the islanders knew, he could communicate most of his basic needs.
Interesting! I hope you’ll share your thoughts below!
We go into “Honest Island” wondering along with Craint, the main character: What’s going on?
If you haven’t read the story yet, I highly recommend you don’t rob yourself of the experience of reading it and trying to solve the mystery before reading the author interview or any commentaries, including this one.
I read it twice, and then listened to the author’s reading, before I read the interview, thankfully…
(Incidentally: *Why, for ding-dong sake, does The New Yorker interject links to these interviews near the *beginning of the online text versions of their short stories? They should be at the *end!)
…Not that Jackson spelled anything out, but he would have spoiled the reading for me in a big way, regardless. You don’t want to find out how. So read the story without any preclues, which I can’t avoid offering if I’m going to comment. Having said that:
*Preclue Alert*
Bye bye now.
Come back later.
We’ll be here.
A man finds himself on a populated island and seems to be suffering amnesia, increasingly over time. He doesn’t understand the native language, but he’s getting by and bring treated well by the natives.
Now I’ll share my thoughts on the story as I was reading. They may or may not be what the author intended—which may be an irrelevant consideration.
Because the ferry service off the island is (purportedly) on hiatus indefinitely, and Craint observes that other foreigners like himself seem to have blended into the population, I suspected that he is not intended to ever leave. My first guess was that he has been sent to the island as some kind of humane criminal sentence, a living-death sentence, having been drugged or otherwise deprived of his memory—which would mean the story is set in a fantasy world.
His acquaintance with a more recently arrived foreign man, Budger, who appears to be more mildly amnesic, seems to confirm my suspicion that the amnesia is progressive.
Not knowing why, Craint seems obsessed with a habit of constructing tiny cairns with four stones. When he and Budger discover a large number of these cairns in an old abandoned lab building, I guessed that Craint had built them there, before his amnesia had progressed, to keep count of the days he had been on the island. Is the lab really “forbidden”? Do “they” know he went there?
Budger suggests that they are expected to provide new blood to the island’s population—that ls, breed with tha natives. Craint and Budger discuss an apparent quotation they are both familiar with:
“We do not concern ourselves with the death of animals, for animals live in an eternal present . . . Without hope to point forward or memory to point back, existence has no meaning. And therefore death has no meaning.”
Although I question the validity of this interpretation of animal consciousness, the quotation seems to confirm my growing suspicion that they are not serving criminal living-death sentences. Having already caught on to the French meaning of “craint”, a form of the verb “to fear”, I guessed that they were on the island to escape the fear of death. Are the people of the island a growing population with the same motivation? Is this an experiment, begun at the old lab, to create a society, or at least a colony, of people free from the fear of death? Is their language one that evolved from forgetting the old?
Was “the girl” (“Lila”, according to Craint), when she took his arm, non-verbally pleading with Craint not to stir up fear, or any kind of distress? Is she, perhaps, a true native, island-born to parents who came here to forget? Has she lived free from amnesic drugs? Why is she the only islander whose name we learn? Have they all forgotten their names? Is shedding personal identity part of the program? What might be the significance of the other names mentioned in the story? : Budger, Virginie, Cassandre, Paul. Why do the houses have no windows? Why is there so little activity on the beach and water? Why aren’t people swimming in the middle of summer? …
Craint’s conversation with the “prefect” (who must be outside the experiment, maybe in charge of it) seems to confirm my suspicion that the progressive amnesia is imposed by drugs, by consent. Or are the drugs a temporary regimen with permanent effects? Did Craint sign documents committing himself to the experiment? Did he manage to sneak away? Or did “they” allow him to leave? What sorts would also have been on the ferry? How is it that there was a party apparently awaiting him on the other side? How did they know he was coming? Why did he leave them in the first place?
I could offer answers to some of these remaining questions. However, as the author tells us, the answers are ultimately “open-ended”, even from *his point of view.
I’ll be fascinated to read what others see in the story. Is there a story behind the story which perfectly fits, and doesn’t contradict, any of the clues? And the interview: I’d love to read some comments on Jackson’s references to various literary works.
Great questions. I latched onto this bit that Budger says – “The deer whose antlers grew so large and heavy it couldn’t survive.” The antlers I took to mean the weight of the past, the burden of memory or history – and, more broadly, the evolution of human consciousness which has allowed us to become (arguably) more complex than animals but has also strapped us with existential dread and the fear of death. The voluntary release of oneself from memory/history is like an effort to reverse this. Which of course doesn’t work (at least for Craint), because the past – and fear, “Craint” – is baked into us by time.
“Craint” is pretty similar to “cairn.” The cairns could be a means of tracking time, but historically they’ve also been used as markers of monuments and burial sites – a means of remembrance. Thinking also about Budger’s name – Google just told me it’s Australian slang for “good” or “fine,” which tracks, since he seems to be feeling pretty good about his amnesia, in contrast to Craint’s daily anguish. But also the name can be read as “one who budges,” someone yielding and more malleable.
I also think it’s implied that there’s some racial/ethnic difference between Budger/Craint, who are probably respectively English and French, and the local islanders. Is this effort to try to rid oneself of the past somehow tied to whiteness? Colonialism? Do only certain people get this opportunity? Is it expensive?
There are a lot of possibilities in this story. Jackson has given us a lot of detail but since the protagonist, Craint, has no memory, most of the whole story has a nebulous quality to it.
There are some clues. “Without hope to point forward or memory to point back, existence has no meaning.”
And then later from the secondary character, “He had had a promising career, but it all leveled off. Gone slack. It wasn’t that he minded the work, but you reach a certain age. You know, and you start wondering what it’s all for.” It’s a ‘myself lost’ kind of situation.
Jackson gives us not too much detail except for bare aspects of a particular kind of situation so the reader can sort it out. And readers will sort it out differently.
What if it was the thought of a promising career that never happened and one only realizes it at a certain age. Budger is like a slightly different double or doppelganger for Craint. Craint could have had a family which he almost recognizes at the end or not.
This story seems to have an existential bent in that when you’re young, life seems full of purpose and possibility and then dwindles down to a static nothing happening sort of existence. There are no guarantees but one hopes they might get a two for one from a Supreme Being. A second life to make up for the inadequacies and not quite achievables of the first one but with a reboot thrown in, containing a no memory blank disk. Or as in Hindu spiritual philosophy, you have seven lives to get it right, hopefully alongside your best spiritual partner.
The great part of this story is that it suggests that we are always stuck or trapped even in our eternal present especially when trying to make sense of life even while it is still in process especially at the moment we reflect upon it.
There is a nothing can occur out of nothing quality. Yet Craint does manage to get off the island and might manage to rejoin his family. So there is a kind of hope for a reader to see if they want or not. The great thing about anyone’s story is that anything can happen. One is always there, somewhere in the middle until finally the shop closes or their train reaches its final destination. Always good to somehow realize.