1. Connor
Katelyn Connor
NMED Giving and Receiving Accounts of the Self
One Minus One: Formulating Emptiness
Colm Toibin’s moving story “One Minus One” is a beautiful illustration of a dissociated
event becoming significant through writing. Donnel Stern’s insightful article “Unformulated
Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis” concisely explains the
complex psychological processes that are at work in Toibin’s story about the death of his mother.
For six years, the narrator was unable to express the traumatic experience of the death of his
mother in language. It is only now through the co-construction of his experience of his mother’s
death, that the narrator brings meaning and significance to the last real thing that happened to
him.
At the beginning of Stern’s article, he explains that consciousness is an exercise that must
be actively put to work during life events. He argues against Freud’s notion that dissociation is
an active intricacy at work in the mind, and claims instead that truly grasping the fullness of an
experience and how it changed an individual requires conscious effort (86). To literally put the
experience into words is a revelation of thoughts and feelings, and is a testament of who an
individual is, and what the experiences mean in life (93). Toibin’s story is the first time that he
begins to make meaning not only of his mother’s death, but also the absence of his father.
Through expressing this grief, the narrator is transforming a traumatic and unspoken experience
into a beautiful and creative testament of his past that he can finally move on from.
“One Minus One” is narrated in the second person, which makes this story an intimate,
co-constructed testimony right from the first line. He goes through every minute circumstance of
the experience- from where he was when he first got the phone call about his mother’s failing

2. Connor2
health, all the way down to what his past lover wore- in order to place himself and his readers
within the story. His emotions at this time seem blocked, similarly to how they were when the
actual event happened. The numbness lasted for six years, and it is only now that he feels that he
can express them (Toibin, 273). He must start off with a lucid connection to his mother through
the metaphor of the moon, and from there he slowly takes himself out of the exact time and place
of where he is in the present, and into his formerly dissociated experience.
Through the small details of the stories and the detached numerical descriptions, the
narrator begins to subtly reveal the dynamics of the relationship between himself and his family.
He talks about the time when he first experienced loss in childhood with the absence of both his
parents and eventual death of his father, and how the experience formed the way he viewed death
and absence itself. He tells the interlocutor that in the months where his father was dying, his
mother was absent and never made contact with him or his siblings. The effects of the
abandonment become more relevant as the story progresses to when his mother leaves
permanently. This distance he experienced with his parents sets up the precedent not only for the
way he views his relationship with his family later on in life, but also how he describes the way
the relationship with his mother formed itself. The disconnection the readers feel to the narrator
is expressive of the relationship that he lost, as well as the loss of emotion and feeling he is
struggling to express in the text.
The point of this story from the narrator’s childhood is an example of how truth and
imagination interact within the narration of a life event. In Stern’s article, he examines passages
from Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” to express the ways in which a story does not
necessarily have to be true to give the needed insight and emotion for the story. One poignant
example from O’Brien’s work is when he talks about the differences between his life experiences

3. Connor3
in combat and the short stories he wrote about combat. Although he may not have actually killed
someone in his lifetime, the narration of him killing a Vietnamese soldier shows the profound
effects war can have on an individual, as well as the line between human moral and the call of
duty (Stern, 94). Toibin also beautifully executes this lack of detail not necessarily in the
fictionalization of any event, but in the vague and unformulated narration of his traumatic
childhood experience of abandonment. The lack of memory begins to show readers an
unreliability in the truthfulness of the narration of real-life events, but enriches the reading in a
way that reveals a deeper side of the narrator’s understanding of his relationship with his mother.
In a similar way, the narrator in Toibin’s short story could be expressing the loss of his
father and abandonment of his mother in a fictional and vague experience. Many times, Irish
fathers are lost to alcoholism or neglect. If this was the truth, rather than outwardly labeling the
illness and placing the blame on his father, the narrator is able to simply express the way the
months of absence affected his own views during childhood and beyond. Although the reader
does not get the full story behind his mother’s absence and father’s death, it is not relevant to the
purpose of the story. What is important to this section of the short story is how the readers better
understand the narrator’s emotions and assumptions as he moves forward in the story, based on
past experiences. As Stern explains, “a certain degree of subjectivism is inevitable for anyone
who seeks meaning in life and not the mere sequence and conglomeration of events… because
when it comes to the measurement of reliability and validity, meaning is uncooperative” (95).
Whether or not the story being told is nonfiction is not as important as the meaning expressed
within it. The vague section, which contrasts to the detailed descriptions of events, serves as a
glimpse into the culture of the narrator and the way expressing emotion is valued within his
family.

4. Connor4
At this point in the story, the narrator begins to show his emotions in a passive, yet
extremely effective way. Rather than saying outright that he was feeling an overwhelming sense
of loss, he simply says “this should be nothing, because it resembled nothing, just as one minus
one resembles zero,” (Toibin, 280). It is here that he is the closest he has ever been, as Stern
expresses it, “speaking from the heart” (99) to a person who once knew him well enough to hear
and understand those emotions. It becomes clear that the way the narrator was taught to deal with
emotions was to push them away, so his vocabulary and range of expression is limited at this
point in the story.
Stern explains in his article that this difficulty in articulation is not uncommon. He
explains “to communicate about a matter of substance is liable to be difficult… because, after all,
the thought hasn’t been spoken before,” (101). The narrator clearly struggles with explaining his
feelings on such a personal level. This is emphasized when it is finally time for him and his sister
to decide on his mother’s last course of treatment. He sees the family as “a distant counsel”
(Toibin, 281), and refers to his mother as “your mother” (282) with his sister. Both of these
examples bring a dark humor that allows the narrator to distance himself with the reality of his
mother’s grave situation. This again could be seen as a consequence of culture, because his sister
participates in the jokes, and his brother is seen as completely absent from the strong emotions
he is so tied to. His brother was always the favorite of his mother, but when it came time for her
to go, he left for Dublin in order to escape the emotions that were coming so close to surfacing.
The most truthful moment of Toibin’s short story comes when the narrator is finally
beginning to realize why he has to come back to Ireland, and who it is that he must say goodbye
to. He honestly speaks from the heart when he directly talks about his emotions, and begins to
understand the ways he is permanently tied to these feelings. He says, “I could feel that this

5. Connor5
going home to my mother’s bedside would not be simple, that some of our loves and attachments
are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and
regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage,”
(281-282). Although he does not go into detail about which parts of his mother he is attached to
and detached from, the expression of pain and loss is creative, beautiful, and comes to be a way
for the narrator to better understand his time with his mother as valued, but strained.
As the narrator is getting close to the heart of his pain and loss, he begins to let language
take hold of him and the words seem to come out unplanned in an almost ethereal way. It is here
that the narrator sees the “recognition of the power of expression we can have in language, but
only if we give ourselves over to it and do not force meanings, allowing them to arise within it,”
(Stern, 93). Rather than staying close to the actual events and trying to control the emotions that
arise, the narrator can release himself through writing from the hold that the event keeps him,
and can allow meaning to arise organically out of his grief. No longer is he trapped by this
overwhelming and traumatic event; he can now find the time to grieve and truly let go.
At the end of the piece, the narrator says that he can now find relief in his grief, because
it means that the moment has passed. He can move on to a place where his past relationships and
familial tensions no longer consume him. Because he has been able to finally express the way the
event affected him, he can allow other things to happen to him (282). Although much is still left
unsaid about the state of his relationship with his brother, sister, and interlocutor, the narrator
created a meaningful representation of his loss through words that he was not able to do before.
Due to language, time, and distance, the narrator can release the boundaries that kept him away
from his emotions for the six years between when the last real thing happened to him, to when he
can finally express why.

6. Connor6
Works Cited
Stern, Donnel. “Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis.”
Reconsidering Self-Deception. 1997. 85-111. Print.
Toibin, Colm. “One Minus One.” Mothers and Sons. New York: Scribner. 2007. 273-288. Print.