What's my motivation here? "Our Children" by Vanessa Cuti, Best American Short Stories 2021

Non-writers might think all writers agree that it's important to reveal a fictional character's motivations for what they do and say. We're all familiar with that line put into the mouth of flustered actors and actresses: What's my character's motivation here? Actors supposedly find it impossible to embody a character without having enough of a backstory to understand why they are doing the things called for in the script. Many (most, probably) literary stories seem to want to give the reader something similar to what these theoretical actors are asking their directors to give them--an understanding of what is going on in the character's head and why.

But there are some who argue for something quite different. Aatif Rashid explains this contrarian view of motivation here: 

In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s characters are compelling because he makes their motivations purposefully unclear in order to create greater psychological complexity: “Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations.”

This idea clearly challenges one of the traditional notes almost every writer receives in a writing workshop, that readers didn’t fully understand what a character wanted and so the writer should clarify those motivations. Add a backstory that explains why this character decided to leave their husband. Tell us about their mother and father so we can understand why they’re so withdrawn. Give them some past trauma to explain their present depression. Alongside such notes, we’re also taught that a character’s want should drive the story’s plot. And so, writers end up clarifying their characters’ desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It’s Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience.

It would be wrong to think that providing motivation is an either/or choice. It's more like a spectrum. You can provide zero clues as to motivation ("John shot Bob"). You can provide small clues as to motivation ("John shot Bob because he hated him,") leaving it up to the reader to try to find clues in the text that would explain the hatred. You can give a simple backstory ("John shot Bob because he hated him for having rejected his script for a Game of Thrones spin-off with Tormond Giantsbane working in a modern-day cubicle job.) Or you could go one more step--probably too far--and give the backstory and then also explain what the backstory did to the psyche of the character. ("John shot Bob because he hated him for rejecting his script; for you see, John always had an inferiority complex that came out when he was rejected...")

There's probably not one right answer for all stories. Different stories likely feel more or less satisfying with different levels of revelation of motivation. It's important to pick the right one for each story, not have a grand aesthetic to cover all fiction.

"Our Children" leans toward not explaining motivation

In "Our Children, a woman first divorces a man with whom she had two children, then marries the man she left him for, who also has two children. They endure all the turmoil of upending two families and starting a new life together. There are four major life choices the main character makes, which are given differing levels of explanation as to motivation. However, the tendency for all is to lean toward less explanation, rather than more.

Choice One: Deciding to marry husband #1 (Peter) in the first place. From the first line, we see a character who doesn't put too much stress on the "why" of her life choices. She begins to explain her life by saying, "I was once married to a man." This matter-of-factness, the way she was married to "a man," as if any man would have fit the bill, tells us a lot about her lack of introspection when making major decisions. Perhaps it's normal for young people. Nearly everyone, whether they got divorced or not, can relate to her saying she "didn't know what marriage was supposed to be. I had no idea what I was expecting." This is close to "John shot Bob." 

Choice Two: Leaving Peter for husband #2 (Dan). The main character shows more agency about this choice, more conscious thought behind her decision. She calls him "Dan" in the first line about him, rather than a generic "man." She provides an attempt to explain why she fell for him: he was feeling sweet potatoes in the grocery store, something the narrator also does but most people don't. This would be in the "John shot Bob because he hated him" realm of exposition: yeah, it's an explanation, but it invites further questions. In spite of being somewhat more in charge of her own destiny with this choice, the main character is still somewhat passive when meeting Dan. She talks of "something that happens to me," and the reader begins to suspect that her life is all "something that happens to her" and few actions she is willing to own. The main character seems to believe fate dictates life in ways she cannot control: "Everything that was to happen had already begun to happen." 

The main character does sometimes show flashes of a more active side to her, usually in the form of outbursts of anger. This anger tends to be focused at the combined children she and Dan share. She flips a bowl and swears in front of them to show she is capable of being formidable. She enjoys the quieter, more adult-like feeling of the house when the children are not around. She describes it as "cooler." Preferring cool things to hot makes sense for a character who prefers to avoid taking responsibility for her own life. Hot is the temperature of active things. 

When thinking about how she would explain being a homewrecker to Dan's ex-wife, she still uses the language of someone who feels more like a victim of fate than a captain of it. "I wouldn't have chosen it this way." "Two people fell in love...I did not intend for this to happen." "There was a glitch." And so on. 

Choice three: Leaving the children at a cabin. This is probably the most consequential decision she makes. It is also the one that has, paradoxically, both the most and the least attempt at an explanation. It's got plenty of attempts at an explanation--it was that black tail of smoke from the fire, it was the rot in the walls, it was the sound of a raccoon eating a chipmunk--but they all seem to be non-sensical. If she had ever been hauled into court and forced to explain her actions, it probably would have come down to this: "I wasn't in my right mind." Again, she uses the language of one being passively controlled, "a puppet waking, someone's hand in my back." There is no motivation to give because there almost is no motivation. A puppet has no motivation of its own.

Choice four: Going back for the kids. While most people have never left their children in the wilderness, anyone can understand the sense of panic the main character felt, the question she puts to Dan, "Do you know what our lives will be like" if they don't leave the children.

The decision to go back is obviously a turning point in the main character's life. She has done it on her own, without even Dan coming with her. (Karen Carlson read it as the couple going back together, but I didn't see Dan in there. I guessed he was still passed out back home.) She has obviously made a choice to be mother to "our children" by the end. The concluding scene shows her at her most motherly, calling to the children. A transformation has happened. But why? Surely a character's cathartic moment of transformation should have some kind of account of how it happened, right? 

When she panics in the cabin, leaves the kids, and convinces Dan to run with her, they go back home, get drunk and high, and have sex all over the place. She then has a possibly drug-induced vision of an imaginary future for the four children. It's something of a Swiss Family Robinson/Robinson Crusoe dream. The four children would immediately adapt to living in the wild, learn to live off the land, and thrive.

I tend to think leaving a bunch of kids alone in the wild would end up like this more than what the narrator imagines.

Why would this make her go back at top speed to be with the kids before they woke up? Wouldn't it have the opposite effect? A catharsis has clearly taken place in which the main character has changed and is now actively choosing to be a mother, but unlike most turning points, we have nothing to tell us why. She was picturing them happy without her, picturing herself happy without them, and then in the next scene, she is barreling down the highway to return to their "hot, sweet" bodies. (Okay, that sounds bad to say "hot, sweet bodies" about kids, but it's not pervy.)   

One possible reading is that she never really ran out of the cabin. At the end of her vision of the children's future, she imagines her daughter one day marrying Dan's son. "They mate like bobcats on a flat rock in the sun. Or like humans in a room of the cabin, its door locked." Maybe her sudden return in her vision to the cabin where she ran out from is her mind returning to the cabin she never actually physically left. Soon after imagining the children marrying, she thinks of names they might give their child, and the last one she thinks of is "something familial" like Dan. And then the scene changes and she's eastbound and down back to the cabin. Was this small thought of "something familial" among all the other parts of her vision enough to make her choose the life she has apparently chosen by the end?

Or was it the episode with the deer in her vision? The kids kill a deer, meaning to eat it, then realize they have no idea how to safely butcher a deer carcass. Not wanting to die of food poisoning, they leave the animal, but not before one boy takes its tooth as a trophy, thinking "things die for no reason all the time." Was this a terrifying enough intrusion on her fantasy that she decided to go rescue the kids?  

We don't know. This isn't the kind of story that's going to beat us over the head with explanations of motivation. But maybe we can think of what makes choices three and four different from choices one and two. The main character seems to have made choices in life somewhat without much forethought, guided only by instinct. She has regretted some choices, and wonders why she couldn't have made the best choices all along. Still, she has freedom to undo the decisions she regrets, which allows her to remain somewhat passively pulled along by the river of fate. Until kids come along. Kids are the end of a significant portion of liberty. They are the end of the ability to passively let life come to you. You have to be actively in it with kids. 

Of course, she had kids before leaving her first husband for Dan, but they didn't have the same "hot" feeling to them. Her own kids, she could probably think of as something that "happened" to her, but a big blended family of kids is something she chose. Or needs to choose. 

This realization causes a moment of panic in her (whether real or imagined), but the panic eventually resolves itself. We're not going to go deep into the why. We're not going to get a backstory from her childhood about why she was a commitment-phobe. She was scared and then she wasn't. Since every reader can relate to the panic that comes with having children (even if they've never had them), every reader can easily imagine that there is a good reason without being given one. Iago hates Othello. Why? Who knows, but people hate others for lots of reasons, so maybe sometimes it's enough to just know someone hates someone else, just as anyone can understand the angst surrounding kids (even if we know our own damn decisions gave us those kids) and the final decision to stay with them. 

Karen Carlson noted something similar about the lack of motivation in her take here. Rhiannon Morgan-Jones expresses her sympathy for the mother and the her difficulty managing the expectations put on mothers here.