<em>Where Reasons End</em> and the Trickiness of Stories About Suicide

“And if there is another end beyond the dead end, it cannot be called dead, can it?”

In Yiyun Li’s novel Where Reasons End, an unnamed narrator converses with her teenage son, Nikolai, in the months following his death by suicide. This question, posed by the narrator, is one of many attempts by a grieving mother to make sense of losing her son by interrogating language itself. Throughout the book, she ruminates on the etymology of words such as and , as if, by defining these terms, she can find meaning in her experience of them. She and Nikolai banter over word choice and flit in and out of shared memories. Nikolai, who is omniscient, reads her mind and responds to her thoughts; his mother wonders how much longer their conversation can last.