A Story I Loved: "Cell One" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Staff Writer
- Aug 13
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 15
While she’s probably best known as a novelist, I think Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short stories are really something special. I have a fond place in my heart for novelists who can still know the rhythms of a short story even after writing novels, and return to it occasionally, like a cherished lover. They know how to do something fresh and innovative in their short stories we don't always see in their novels. They take full advantage of the particular benefits of the short story model. Other novelists that remind me of this are Junot Diaz, and James Joyce.
To put it succinctly: I think the short story is the ultimate culmination of the love of writing fiction. Fiction does not exist without the short story. I think short stories can sometimes show more about craft than an entire novel can. I love novels, of course, but they have never been able to enrapture me, even at their very best, the way an excellent short story can. Good short stories hook into the heart and stay there. Short stories force fiction writers into an A-game, a sharpness, a rigor of total control over each sentence, a finesse over each word. And short stories are done for love of that craft. Well, all writing is done for love of the craft, considering the nature of the pay, but short stories especially so. I don’t know. Something about this short story reminds me of why I love short stories so much as a whole.
So. Cell One. It’s a pretty easy read, which again, is not necessarily a criticism or a compliment, but anyone who’s daunted by very intense, stylistic stories shouldn’t be put off. The story is written in elegant prose, and the storyline is simple: it’s about a family dealing with a troublesome brother. The brother, despite coming from a well-to-do family of educated professors, finds himself in cahoots with a gang that terrorizes the town, stealing things and killing people. The brother takes this a step further- in order to gain some kind of street credit, he robs his own family while they’re away. When his family finds out, they weep and are aggrieved, but seem helpless to stop this golden boy, good-looking, charming, slick-talking, into falling prey into the arms of this criminal enterprise.
The narrator interests me here, too. Narrators are the focal point of the story, and the story cannot really exist without the narrator. Yet the story is really not about her. It’s about the brother, Nnamabia. The narrator describes her brother in jealous terms- he’s the golden one, literally. He’s frequently described as “beautiful”, and his skin is so fair that the narrator’s mother and the ladies in town fawn over him. It’s almost a Prodigal Son story. The good child- the daughter, who supports her parents and opposes her brother’s wrongdoings, watches silently as her parents try again and again to wrest back control of their son, who seems, for better or worse, helpless.
But again, back to what I was saying- a story can’t exist without the narrator. And so the author plays a trick on us- making us think that the narrator is not so consequential to the story, only to wind us up for the final line, at the end of the story.
I’ll try not to spoil the ending entirely, since I want you to read it first incredulously, but it goes roughly like this. The sister and parents go to visit their brother, and they are expecting that he has done something terrible. But instead, their expectations are reversed. For maybe the first time in his life, he has done something completely unselfish, in total pursuit of the well-being of another human being. He has done it, seemingly, without a motive, either. And that’s the contradiction, the human messiness, that the story leaves us in. We’re sitting, basking in this final line, and we’re just as bewildered as the sister. There is a faint pride, a sense of love. The ending is not trite. It's not redemption. It's confusing and it's very human. Because who can predict a human? Who can understand a human? Why would a teenage robber who seemingly has no care for even his own family or a real moral compass do something like this for a veritable stranger? What we try to do in fiction is just to sketch these characters out, to give them various motives and traits, to make them more than the sum total of their actions. We try to make them come alive on the page. Adichie does that so well, so beautifully, so achingly.
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