Disintegration

Both pieces of this weeks reading have a fascinating characteristic in common - the disintegration of narrative. For 'debriefing' it's the seemingly coherent - if a bit spotty and non-sequitur - flow of information that gets more and more convoluted as the story goes on, causing intentional confusion with the strands that revolve around a different 'Doris' three times yet all have a connection at some point in the story. For the 'babysitter' it's the half dozen different versions of the same relatively short timespan that get increasingly tangled up through the constant jumps of POV and point in time and the continuous paradox developing between them, signalling the reader that at least half of them need to be fantasies or happening in a different place at the same time (as seems indicated by the conclusion, it's striking however, that even with a careful piecing together of all the different strands in their own chronological order the pieces still don't match up completely).
Both stories make use of purposeful misdirection by giving different protagonists the same name or indeed not assigning a name at all (both the victim/temptress in 'the babysitter' and the narrator of debriefing remain nameless and therefore anonymous, the latter even subject to gender ambiguity) . Both of them also ultimately acknowledge the stylistic character of being 'pieced together' even though they introduce and conclude and overarching plotline.
For that reason they both remain fascinating and also inaccessible to a point.