Arc, spiral, and radial plots in Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

This post discusses the entire plot of Death of the Author, including the ending.

From the moment I started reading Death of the Author, I knew I wanted to spend time thinking through how Nnedi Okorafor uses the three different story strands to orchestrate the pacing, tension, and meaning of the novel. Some novels use subplots to add interest and complexity to their main plot. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto, which I analyzed in Novel Study, is a good example of this: Its three distinct subplots add complications and comic relief to the main romance plot. In Death of the Author, by contrast, the three story strands are structurally connected at the root and cannot exist independently.

Despite having a common root, each of the three strands develops into a different story shape. I’m drawing here on Jane Alison’s thought-provoking book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, which offers writers new ways to think about story patterns. Okorafor uses the familiar arc shape—whose dominance Alison challenges in her book—for the Robots strand, while the other strands demonstrate two of Alison’s alternatives, a spiral and a radial.

From the beginning, Zelu’s plot strand is presented as the primary one. The interview chapters consist of various family members being interviewed about Zelu, and we believe the Robots strand is the Rusted Robots novel we see her begin writing at the end of chapter two. Thus, both of these strands initially feel like they are bonus strands—different kinds of primary material that help readers make their own interpretations of Zelu. The page counts support that: Zelu’s chapters occupy roughly 70 percent of the novel, while the Robots strand gets 20 percent, and the interview chapters make up the remaining 10 percent.

The figure below is a visualization of the three strands of the novel, charting the external intensity of the plots. (See my post on King of Ashes for an explanation of the intensity scoring.)

You can see right away that the Zelu strand is more intense than the Robots strand, which is part of what makes it read as primary. Okorafor makes sure that it’s hard to look away from Zelu and, especially in the first half, the interview chapters provide frequent reminders that something significant is going to befall her. Even when we readers aren’t seeing Zelu on the page, we’re often listening to other people talk about her.

Let’s look more closely at the Robots strand to see how it works before coming back to Zelu. This strand follows a familiar narrative arc, with recognizable stops and story tropes along the way: the reluctant hero, the call to adventure, crossing the first threshold, the mentor, the unexpected ally, the test of loyalty, the dark night of the soul, the turning point, and the ultimate boon. Particularly when you look only at the external intensity graph, we can see that familiar shape of rising action to the climax, followed by falling action as the plot resolves.

In my post on worldbuilding, we saw Ankara introduce herself as a Hume Scholar, a reluctant hero who answers the call to adventure when Udide reveals the “terrible information” that the Earth is threatened, which she must deliver to her fellow Hume robots, who may be able to avert the threat.

The big intensity spike early in the novel, in chapter twelve, represents the crossing of the first threshold—the point at which the hero can no longer turn back. The Ghosts, a different tribe of AIs, have initiated a Purge intended to wipe out Humes, whom they consider to be too like their human creators. The aftermath introduces both the mentor and the unexpected ally: Ankara is severely damaged but saved by Ngozi, the last human alive on Earth. To help repair Ankara, Ngozi captures and embeds a Ghost, Ijele, in her code. The two AIs slowly move from enemies to friends and pledge loyalty to one another after the death of their mentor, Ngozi, which propels Ankara across the threshold and back on her journey.

Ankara reaches the end of her quest, delivering her news to a protected enclave of her fellow Humes who have survived the Purge. Rather than heed the terrible news, however, they are intent on fighting back against the Ghosts; the quest is now not completed but complicated. The ensuing conflict forces both Ankara and Ijele to make a series of best bad choices between loyalty to one another and loyalty to their tribes, leading to Ankara’s dark night of the soul when Ijele abandons her.

Udide appears to deliver news of the turning point: The faraway threat, the Trippers traveling from the sun, is now upon them. In the climax, the Trippers bear down and Ankara, with Ijele back at her side, overcomes what she thought she knew about Hume limitations to write a story to persuade the Trippers not to destroy the Earth. This story, the ultimate boon, resolves the climax of the Robots strand, but it actually turns out to destabilize the other two strands, as we shall see.

If you are attempting an ambitious, multi-strand plot structure, the lesson here is to lean on familiar shapes and tropes for at least one of your strands, giving you more freedom to experiment in the others.

Turning to Zelu’s strand, we see something else entirely. Notice that the internal intensity is consistently quite high: Even when Zelu isn’t experiencing something intense, she’s often feeling something intense. She struggles with panic attacks and negative self-talk, which she often hides from others—heightening the intensity of her experience.

Of her thirty chapters, twenty-two of them have an internal intensity of four or five out of five. Many of the chapters with a gap between a low-intensity external event and a high-intensity internal feeling occur when Zelu is interacting with her family. For example, after she receives the “exos” that allow her to walk again, she spontaneously decides to travel home wearing them rather than use her wheelchair. She breezes through the airport, nonchalantly ignoring the stares and comments. It’s only when she is about to walk into her parents’ home that she feels like she is “walking to her death.”

As I noted in my post on the opening, the title and the first interview chapter together work to put readers on high alert when reading Zelu’s strand. Is she going to die? What is the remarkable thing she did or experienced that those interviewed keep alluding to? In chapter after chapter, we wonder, Is this it? Is she going to drown herself in Lake Michigan? Is she going to be washed out to sea while swimming with dolphins? Will she be killed by Nigerian kidnappers? And, finally, will she die while going into space?

Each time, she lives but comes out the other side of the experience transformed. Zelu’s plot is one of continuous evolution: She creates a bestselling novel that propels her to fame, adapts to a cyborg-like existence with her exos, survives a brutal social media dragging, escapes a kidnapping attempt in Nigeria, masters firearms as a surprising new extension of her independence, and ultimately travels into space while pregnant, after receiving an injection that fundamentally alters her DNA to protect against cosmic radiation—taking “another step away from humanity” even as she creates new life within her. Rather than the familiar wave-shaped arc followed by the Robots plot, Zelu’s plot is more like a spiral, continually circling the same questions and problems.

On a first read, the interview chapters seem to reinforce the spiral shape of Zelu’s strand. Zelu’s family members keep circling around a plot event they don’t name and readers don’t yet know, as well as the childhood accident, a fall from a tree, that left Zelu a paraplegic. As different family members are interviewed, one by one, it becomes clear that her accident traumatized each of them in different ways. They were helpless bystanders to Zelu’s accident and struggle to understand her choices as an adult. Amarachi, the sibling with whom Zelu has the most conflict, admits in her interview that “I was hard on her. I dunno, she just brought that out in me. I wanted her to be good and behave so I wouldn’t worry.”

But there is someone else scrutinizing Zelu, the journalist who interviews her in chapter nine, as part of the advance publicity for her novel. Zelu is immediately on high alert when this “little white guy” not only pronounces her name correctly but also greets her in Igbo. When he reveals that he’s spoken to the university administrator who fired her, Zelu, on the verge of a panic attack, ends the interview. The episode shows Zelu the dangers of this new evolution; she is on the cusp of fame and fortune, but she now has so much farther to fall. She wrote her novel from “rock bottom,” letting “her mind soar, take her higher and higher. Now nothing was there to keep her from falling and falling, down, down, down.”

The next scene of this chapter is an anomaly. A summary paragraph tells us that Zelu responded by email to a list of “reasonable questions” from the journalist, Seth Daniels, resulting in “a good article, according to others,” without a mention of the firing. Then the scene slides into omniscient narration that peers into the future:

Readers still on the scent of the plot will focus on that frustratingly vague referent “it.” What, exactly, did this Seth Daniels see coming? And when are we going to be let in on the secret? But readers coming back to this passage on a second reading of the novel (which this book amply rewards) might wonder something else: Does this passage help us understand the dazzling twist at the end of the novel? Let’s deconstruct that twist now because it forces readers to find an entirely new pattern for everything they’ve read in the first fifty chapters.

In the last chapter in Zelu’s point of view, we are with her as she blasts into space. A wealthy entrepreneur has invited her to be part of a three-day exploratory mission with no specific destination or goal. After liftoff, she feels a “sweet and sharp pain” and sees a jagged white line open in front of her. We wonder, Is this finally it? Is this the “death” of the title? But in the next scene, Zelu opens her eyes and reveals the bright line was metaphorical, a “crack in reality.” She finally gets the inspiration for her second novel: “But she wouldn’t give them this one. She would keep it to herself.” Our interpretive compass for the title swings decisively toward the metaphorical. Zelu will be a writer, perhaps, but no longer an author because to be an author one must have readers.

But the chapter heading on the very next page—“Death of the Author by Ankara”—sends our interpretive needle spinning wildly. In the previous chapter from Ankara’s point of view, we learned that she ultimately thwarted the threat coming to the planet by writing a story, and now we learn that story was Zelu’s. Ankara pushes past the boundary that she and all other AIs had always assumed was there—that only humans could create stories. She tells us, “I crafted her story based on the tales Ngozi had told me of her own life and family history, but I was the one who truly brought Zelu to life, who made her feel real. A Hume. Me.”

My initial shocked disappointment at this twist showed me just how well Okorafor had maintained the “fictive dream” that Zelu was real. The interview chapters added to that illusion. But they also suggest another possibility: that these interviews, in addition to Ngozi’s stories, might have provided the primary materials Ankara drew on for inspiration. We learn in her last POV chapter that Zelu hopes to name her daughter Ngozi, and we’re told by Ankara that the Ngozi who revived her had a great-grandmother who had been an astronaut.

The ending explodes our initial patterns—Ankara’s arc, Zelu’s spiral—and the debris settles into new forms. Okorafor has both Zelu and Ankara describe the patterns they see in their final chapters. As she crosses into space, Zelu closes her eyes and sees “bursts of vibrant color, networks of contours and shapes and figures, ever more complex, yet so direct, imposing.” Ankara—whose novel, Death of the Author, heals the tribal rift between Humes and Ghosts—tells us, “I have come to understand that author, art, and audience all adore one another. They create a tissue, a web, a network. No death is required for this form of life.”

In Meander, Spiral, Explode, Alison describes a radial story as one in which “a core of energy radiates outward . . . born of a nucleus, kernel, black hole.” Thanks to the final twist, I think we can see this pattern in Death of the Author, with the central questions—what is life? what is death? what does it mean to create?—providing the energetic core powering a radial mosaic of vibrant stories: Zelu and Ankara’s, but also Igbo myth, computer code, fanfiction, and dozens more.

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