No Two Persons: A Novel

The novel’s unconventional narrative structure enacts Bauermeister’s central themes. No Two Persons is organized into three parts and 12 chapters. The chapters are titled with temporal, geographic, and vocational markers. Each chapter presents a new character’s storyline. The only exception to this rule is Part 2, Chapter 1. The titled chapters can be experienced as independent short stories. Indeed, the characters’ narratives are formally sequestered from one another. When Part 1, Chapter 1 ends, Alice’s story ends. When Part 1, Chapter 2 begins, Lara’s story begins. Therefore, each character has an independent life and plot line. The 10 characters live in different places and wrestle with different questions. By separating their narratives one from another on the page, Bauermeister structurally conveys the characters’ loneliness, longing, and disconnection. The narrative structure mirrors their physical solitude.

No Two Persons is the overarching container that connects the 10 characters’ disparate lives. Few of the characters meet or interact with one another. However, they are all connected via their participation in a communal story. They are also linked by Alice’s novel, Theo. Theo is one of the few images that recurs in every single chapter. The fictional novel breaks the rules of the narrative structure and thus transcends the characters’ insular realities.