A Valentine's Day Narrative: Confronting the Abyss*

A Valentine's Day Narrative: Confronting the Abyss*

Jim Thomas

Department of Sociology

Northern IllinoisUniversity

DeKalb, IL60115

June 30, 2008

*This is an substantially expanded and revised version of a paper forthcoming in Social Psychology Quarterly, June, 2008.

Abstract

Underlying our attempts to understand violent behavior lies the belief that we can impose sense on seemingly insensible actions and events.Sometimes, in the face of inexplicable events, we are left to try toreconstruct a narrative that, while not providing a satisfactory explanation either of motive or state-of-mind of an offender, at least imposesa sense-making format on events to help give us a more-comfortablesense of closure. When a mass murder is committed by one who gave off no

prior signs, was well-liked and respected by peers, and had no apparentreason for acting violently prior to the event, as occurred onValentine's Day at Northern Illinois University (NIU) early in 2008,friends, family, police,FBI profilers, and a stunned community continue to ask WHY?!?

Drawing from Nietzsche, I attempt to create a narrative Orwell, symbolic interactionism, and existential literature, I build in narrativesociology to spin a story to make sense of an inexplicable event.

A Valentine's Day Narrative: Confronting the Abyss

In the movie Fight Club, the mild-mannered protagonist is confronted byhis boss, who criticizes his unkempt and bruised appearance and anodd note he found. The narrator responds:

Well, I gotta tell you: I'd be very, very careful who you talk to about that, because

the person who wrote that... is dangerous. And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho

might just snap, and then stalk fromoffice to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine

gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and

co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to

you (Narrator: Fight Club, 1999)

Social scientists spin yarns to make things that seem mysterious less-so.Generally, we bring together data, a generally accepted method foranalysis, and a scheme for reducing it to a

sense-making story that gives a satisfying account for understandingwhatever we're looking at. Sometimes, however, neither our methods norour stories are particularly satisfying.

When good people do bad things, we seek answers, usually drawing fromthe repertoire of theories and concepts that served us well inthe past.Reason, that fundamental Enlightenment principle guiding our belief anddesire to understand the world around us, provides a comforting wayto understand things that might ordinarily seem mysterious.As social scientists, we attemptto uncover the etiology, processes, and outcomes of attitudes, feelings, and actions of individuals or groups as they shape therelationship(s) between identity, self, and correspondingbehaviors that sustain those relationships. When confronted with individual acts of apparently senseless violence, such as theshootings at Columbine or Virginia Tech, our theories and concepts provide no satisfying explanation.

Denouement

On February 14, 2008, Steve Kazmierczak walked into room 101 in Cole Hall, a large NIU campus auditorium seating over 500 students, but on this day only about half of the 187 students enrolled were present. Armed with asawed-off Remington 870 12-gauge pump shotgun and three semi-automatic pistols, he walked onto the stage of the classroom and blasted students inthe front rows with the shotgun.Some students ducked under the seats, others sat immobile,some belly-crawled under seats away from the shooting, andsome sitting near the only two exit aisles fled toward the reardoors attempting to escape.Students who observed the shooting reported that after firing the firstsalvos, Steve left the stage and walked down one aisle, continuing toshoot at students who had not yet left their seats and at the students crowding into the aisles toward the exit. One source close to the investigation reported that several studentswitnessed Steve pause about halfway down the aisle, pointed a pistolat his head, make a "goofy" face as if to ask, "Should I do it now?"The students indicated that he "sort of shook his head and resumed firing."After a few more shots, they reported, he returned to the stage andtook his own life. It was as if, in a theatrical moment of

improvisation, he considered deviating from his script and rejectedit, completing instead the denouement. It was over barely two minutes after it began.

After firing six blasts from the shotgunand up to 42 from his handguns, six students were dead, at least 18 wereinjured from the shooting or from scrambling to escape, and 25,000 secondary victims of the NIU campus community were left to reconstruct campus life and ask, "Why!?"

Narrative Sense-making

Why did it happen?

"Why" is always a loaded, and often wrong, question. Why what? Attributing meaning to behavior often reflects the attributor more than the attributee. When we ask "why" somebody acted as they did, we usually mean we want theirreasons, what was going on in their minds, what impelled the action(s).For social scientists, attempts to link human behavior to the socialprocesses in which they are embedded creates problems. How do we knowother minds so that we can make sense of seemingly senseless events?How do we connect human behavior to the institutional and cultural

contexts in which they occur? How do we separate motive and personalmeaning of an act from structure and social meaning or from our own notions ofwhat constitutes a sense-making tale?

On one hand, we could draw from Descartes' (1955) mind/body distinction,and argue that both mind and body have separate attributes from whichwe can deduce conclusions based on the postulate that what applies toone mind will apply to all. The theological foundations aside, a

Cartesian approach offers a basis for examining the attributes of "mind" by recognizinginnate shared attributes of others' thoughts. Or, we could draw from Hume (1965) and argue that knowing other minds occurs only throughsense-experience and inferring from the data by casual reasoning; wecan't really know.

There is an alternative.Consistent with Hume, Mead (1934) argued that we understand other minds

by viewing them as a communicative social process, one in which the mind is thereflection of the interplay between ourgestures in the form of significant symbols, including language,physical expressions, and other forms of communicated meaning, and ourbehavior.Our thoughts emerge from internal self-conversations in which we act out in a social process with others the attitudes and thoughts occurringwithin. But, sometimes the external processes are so inexplicable that

we can ask only, "What on earth was she thinking!?"All we have left is conjecture of motive and spinning a narrative of themeaning of the aftermath.

Building on the pragmatism of Mead, Blumer (1956, 1940) notes the problem of explanations that overemphasize concepts, theory, and the sociology of correlates, and technique. This tends to make invisible the role of communication in social understanding. The solution, he suggests, requires

accepting our theories and concepts as heuristic devices and focusing on thecommunicative elements reflected in the behavior.

Drawing both from Mead and Blumer, Maines (2001, 1999, 1993)has developed a narrative sociology built around the idea that behaviors oftenemerge and only later does understanding follow.Narratives are rational accounts that provide at least a minimallycredible story to demystify the behavior of others. They are a kind of story that references other activities, orsometimes themselves, and requires that we ignore the distinctionsbetween discourse and behavior produced in reified theories and conceptsagainst which Blumer warned. Narratives tend to be social transactions,and as such, we can examine behavior as itself a narratively structuredoutcome (Maines and Bridger, 1992).Unlike a generic story, which is a conversational activity that recounts

events, a narrative is structured on cultural paradigms that containgroup beliefs, images, values, and shared meanings bound in and containing already-articulated plots (Maines, 1999).

Narrative understanding comes from a contextual interpretative processlinking the meaning human conduct to its social expressions.The cultural frames, once we learn them, condition us to report onevents that are consistent with them. As Nichols, Nolan, and Colyer (2008) observe, guided by media framing,guided by constructed representational practices generated by a framework seeking order, linearity, and a satisfying conclusion, weattempt to impose narrative meanings that might not fit.Mass school shootings, forexample, are interpreted by media or law enforcement by imposing priornarratives on new, similar, events, and we analyze these invoking a

common vocabulary and shared metaphors. We come to expect narrativeswith a denouement that leads to a credible climax: Shooters slay,warning signs occurred, warning signs were missed, and the conclusionthat tragedy could have been prevented with appropriate intervention reaffirms a narrative groundedin the fundamental master frame that events are predictable, thethe social world is understandable, and violence is not random.

For social scientists, a narrative approach serves several functions.First, it allows us to create an explanation for social outcomes derivingfrom individual mental states without resorting to "knowing what wasinside the other mind." It draws from empirical instances of social action

to provide a credible account that connects an actor'sbehavior to a cultural format that gives it meaning.

Second, narratives provide an alternate framework allowing forvarying tropes of discourse and styles of telling that are otherwiseabsent in the monologic discourse of conventional theorizing. Thiscan lead to new vocabularies and fill in gaps in what we thought we knew.

Third, a narrative approach allows a dialectical and iterativeprocess of working back and forth between the frame of the actor, the acts we are trying to understand, and ourown meanings the acts possess for us as we combine each in narrative unity.It gives us what Nichols (2003) calls a dialogical constructionist approach that is not only paradigmatically and intellectually eclectic,

but adds to our understanding of events and how we narrate them.We assess the meaning of the behaviorin the context of its outcome by working back and forth between whatwe know of the behavior from the actors points of view andthe meaning of the outcome within the context of our own frame. Ontologically, this recognizes that what there is to know in the worlddoes not exist independently of the social constructs we employ to knowit, or the structure and tropes of the way we report it.Epistemologically, it reminds us that all interpretations areincomplete, so that what we know and how we know it is in constant flux.

Fourth, a narrative approach allows us to focus on a particular elementof an event to address questions that might not be amenable toconventional analysis.Gubrium and Holstein (1998: 166) suggest that stories are assembled tomeet the situated interpretive demands of those who would use themto make sense of something. In their view, a narrative is an on-goingprocess of composition rather than a linear reporting of experience,and becomes a way of "fashioning the semblance of meaning and order forexperience." Through "analytic bracketing," we can focus on one aspect of

a specific narrative practice while suspending analytic interest in others:

We may focus, for example, on how a story is being told, while temporarily deferring

our concern for thevarious whats that are involved--for example, the substance,

structure, or plot of the story, the context within which it is told, or theaudience to which it

is accountable. We can later return to theseissues, in turn analytically bracketing how the

story is told in orderto focus on the substance of the story and the conditions that shape

itsconstruction. Our ultimate aim in describing the production of coherence is not

nihilistically to challenge or deconstruct the integrity our lives or experience, nor to

reify narrative practice into discretecomponents. Instead, we want to make visible the

way narrative activities play out in everyday practice to both produce coherence and

reveal difference (Gubrium and Holstein, 1998: 165).

Finally, a narrative approach allows addresses our need to find meaningwhere it might not exist by converting selected details into storiesinvolving central characters, plots, and subplots in the context ofsocio-cultural values and, among other things, serve as vehicles forhistory or "collective memory" (Nichols and Nolan, 2004: 145).

One problem with narrative interpretation--as with all interpretation—isthe tension between conjectural story telling, confabulation, anddata-free claims on one hand, and credible, potentially testable,and "objective" claims that can be assessed and evaluated as demonstrablywrong on the other. When the narrator is central to events, this tension becomes even greater. Here, I do my best to follow the data by constructing whatManning and Swan (1994: 464-465) have called a bottom-up narrative, which inductively extract "context-dependent units" that provide meaning to an

event. I focus on the protagonist and the narrative elements to displayhow the shooting unfolds in a structure of oppositions, bothexistential and social.

The Protagonist

The shooter, Steve Kazmierczak, was a 27 year old graduate student whoenrolled at NIU in fall, 2002. His intellectual journey and commitment to social science and socialwork arguably began in Cole Hall in fall, 2003 when he took his firstsociology class and decided then to invest his energy in socialscience.He entered graduate school in politicalscience in fall, 2006, but transferred back to sociology when the term began.Because the sociology program wasn't preparing him for his intended profession,he and his girlfriend transferred to the University of Illinois Champaign/Urbana(UIUC) to begin graduate school in social work in fall, 2007.

In April, 2005, Steve indicated that, up to that point, he had not beeninvolved in many extra-curricular activities, "as I've been focusingstrictly on academics so that I can have something to show for myselfsince getting out of the group home." Steve was an academic success, graduating with nearly a 3.9 grade pointaverage, receiving prestigious academic honors, and during both his time at NIU and UIUC, he continued toread voraciously and pursue ideas, which he was always eager to discuss.Even three weeks prior to theshootings, he was exchanging his intellectual interests with others and spoke of a long-term intent to pursue them.

In many ways an archetypical reflection of Enlighten and modernist idealismwith an unwavering commitment to social justice, Steve was committed to the power of reason to understand and change the world and challengesocial inequality. He judged human suffering as anathema to civilized society,and described by friends, family, and acquaintances as gentle, caring,and nurturing. He was, by all accounts, including those collected bypolice in their subsequent investigation, outside of any profile intowhich mass murderers could be placed. His emphatic attachment to thepower of reason was a world-view and way of sorting through thecomplexity of a chaotic inner and outer world. He was the model"RationalMan."

The Narrative Elements

The credibility of a narrative is a function of how well we tell thestory. Credibility precedes the telling, in part because of the paradigmon which the telling rests, and in part because of elements of thestory that we call "facts" that are pertinent to the story.In the narrative of the NIU shooting, neither friends nor law enforcementagents yet possess elements for a satisfying narrative. But, with littleconjecture, this much as been verified.[1]

We know that Steve possessed another side, one which few people noticed, perhapsbecause the cognitive dissonance generated by the front stage persona of his public self and the less-revealed, although hardly secret, cuesof his private self were little different than that of many others with whom we all interact. Although a superior student andpopular leader, Steve's self-doubts constantly led him to express thathe felt he was "faking it," that he didn't deserve his honors or

reputation, and that he "wasn't worthy" of the accolades he received.He felt that he wasn't worthy of his girlfriend and occasionallymentioned that she would be better off without him.

We also know that he spent a year in a group home for psychological intervention afterhigh school. He was administratively discharged from the army forpsychological reasons after six months, after which he started college.He constantly struggled with depression, for which he periodically took medication. He loved his girlfriend of two years, and even up tothe weeks prior to the shooting were planning their future and a lifetogether. But, at the end of January, 2008, he stopped taking hismedications.

While we may not know what was in Steve's mind, we do know how he spent We know that he was readingNietzsche, leaving behind his own marked copy of The Anti-Christ andsending his girlfriend a copy that she received a day after the shootings.Nietzsche, the vehement critic of modernism, of Enlighten andChristian values, of reason, and of pity and caring about others

represented the antithesis of Steve's values and goals. Yet, Steveoften wore a t-shirt, originally intended as an ironic reference tothe uneasy tension between good and evil,with a quote by Nietzsche printed on the back: