The children “without stories”

AbstractThis article presents an analysis of the French author Tran Minh Huy's memoir Un enfant sans histoire (A Child Without Story, 2022) and two Norwegian novels: Lars Amund Vaage's Syngja (Sing, 2012) and Olaug Nilssen's Tung tids tale (A Tale of Terrible Times, 2017). Huy, Vaage, and Nilssen—all established authors—draw explicitly on their personal experiences as parents of nonverbal children diagnosed with autism. Their works challenge and reshape conventional genre norms and narrative expectations to address the narratological, ethical, and ontological difficulties of representing lives often perceived as lacking traditional “narratability”—that is, lives that appear to have limited dramaturgical progression or apparent agency. The analysis identifies three narrative strategies of triangulation through which the authors construct narrative development, arguing that these approaches contest prevailing assumptions linking narrative coherence with autonomy, agency, and human value. The article further reflects on the potential role of literature within the trilemmatic structure of political ontologies of difference (Boger, 2023). By foregrounding literary form as a site of ethical and ontological inquiry, the article demonstrates how narrative experimentation can interrogate and unsettle normative conceptions of what it means to “have a story.”