Before I begin peeling away the layers of my story, I should explain that much of what follows did not occur to me until long after I had finished writing this story. In fact, though the essential narrative was finished in 1993 (I gave it to my daughter as a wedding present in August of that year), I did not think about how I had written it until I started working on this explanation.

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe says a writer should aim steadily toward a particular effect in fiction, and should put nothing into a story that does not contribute to that effect. I work very differently. Sometimes consciously flouting Poe, I rarely know what effect a story will have when I begin to compose incidents or characters, and I usually become aware of what a story will evoke only well along in the process.

In fact, to jump the gun a little, I have sometimes added details long after thinking a story is finished when I believe that they can intensify an effect that has already emerged. For example, about two years after this story was essentially finished, I began to look for the names of places involved in the Russo-Japanese War, and the last detail I added was the name of Khabarovsk.

Let me begin by reiterating a truism. In memoir and in fiction alike, what grabs your reader is a good story. Even if your life has been one of the most fascinating ever lived by a human being, you must still convey that excitement on the page. An interesting life does not automatically become an interesting story.

After the fact, I realize that there is a perverse kind of sense in presenting this narrative in two installments, as I did here. Considerably more than half the story sets the scene, describing the setting and introducing one of the characters who will play a major role the rest of the way. It is the backstory, which would not even be included in many accounts. Here, however, it serves a number of purposes.

The story takes place in the distant past in a northern Ontario town that, while historically accurate, no longer exists. This allows readers to experience a sense of isolation, something like the sense described by the shammes in his own tale at the end, a sense which is also vaguely felt by the narrator all the way through. He is isolated from his family (in more ways than one, as it turns out); we see him separated in attitude from his visiting relatives in attitude, and we even see him in conflict with his wife. Like most of the narrators in my stories, he shares his attitudes with nobody.

Another point to mention is that this story has two first-person narrators. Ever since I read Washington Irving’s “Adventure of the German Student,” I have been suspicious of first-person narrators. That story concludes with these words:

“And is this really a fact?” said the inquisitive gentleman.

“A fact not to be doubted,” replied the other. “I had it from the best authority. The student told it me himself. I saw him in a mad-house in Paris.”

This brings us to the issue of credibility, of the main narrator of the story as well as of the shammes. Although it is important for stories to entertain us (hence the importance of effective narrative technique both in memoir and in fiction), our reaction depends additionally on how reliable we think the story-teller is. We are reluctant to suspend disbelief if we find out that the person talking to us is in a mad-house in Paris. Or that he has been jailed as a confidence man.

We do not want to have doubts about a narrator in fiction either. The end of this story hangs on the credibility of the shammes. If he cannot be believed, the entire story about his past is called into question. And that is why it is necessary for him to seem to be a liar in the eyes of many people in this fictional Kirkland Lake.

This story does not judge the shammes, and it does not tell readers what us to believe. Readers must come to their own conclusion about whether he can be trusted. The story will work if readers see the facts presented as the narrator does, confused, lost in the struggle for identity, having to make his way to the truth as if underground, without the benefit of miners lights.