In both “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” by Russell Banks, and “Parallel Universes,” by Etgar Keret, multiple worlds are used in two different ways to cope with a loss being experienced by the main characters of the narratives. “Parallel Universes” has the most common form of multiple worlds as the individual that narrates begins with “There’s a theory that says there are billions of other universes” and goes on to imagine those other universes. However, this concept of other universes are used as a coping method for loss. As it is said “There are some parallel universes where I am having sex with a horse, and ones where I win the lottery,” and so on and so forth, but “The only ones that interest [them] are the ones where she isn’t happily
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As the narrator, who calls himself Ron, says “You can put it in the present, even though it took place ten years ago” (1), so the reader understands that they will be experiencing this other world that is Ron’s past. However, as the reader is guided along in Ron’s past and brought back out, it is understood that he does not understand what he feels for Sarah Cole: “I’m still the man in this story [...] but I’m telling it this way because what I have to tell you now confuses me” (7). Thus, continuing in the narrative, the reader transverses between Ron speaking directly to the reader and Ron relaying what he remembers, “trying to tell the story so that [he] can understand what happened between [him] and Sarah Cole” (9). This continues throughout, this back and forth of relaying information to analyzing and commenting on the information given till “He stands back and places his fists on his hips and looks at her. ‘Go on and leave, you ugly bitch,’” (18) and he realizes, “It’s not as if she has died; it’s as if he has killed her” (18). With that, there is this sense of loss as he understood in his past that she was forever gone from him and, as he commented earlier, in the present, “now I have begun to grieve over her death, to wish her alive again”
As the narrator, who calls himself Ron, says “You can put it in the present, even though it took place ten years ago” (1), so the reader understands that they will be experiencing this other world that is Ron’s past. However, as the reader is guided along in Ron’s past and brought back out, it is understood that he does not understand what he feels for Sarah Cole: “I’m still the man in this story [...] but I’m telling it this way because what I have to tell you now confuses me” (7). Thus, continuing in the narrative, the reader transverses between Ron speaking directly to the reader and Ron relaying what he remembers, “trying to tell the story so that [he] can understand what happened between [him] and Sarah Cole” (9). This continues throughout, this back and forth of relaying information to analyzing and commenting on the information given till “He stands back and places his fists on his hips and looks at her. ‘Go on and leave, you ugly bitch,’” (18) and he realizes, “It’s not as if she has died; it’s as if he has killed her” (18). With that, there is this sense of loss as he understood in his past that she was forever gone from him and, as he commented earlier, in the present, “now I have begun to grieve over her death, to wish her alive again”