Aporia and the Unanswered Question

Aporia is what happens when a writer raises a real question inside a piece of writing and then refuses to close it. The word comes from Greek, and it originally meant something close to "no way through." A writer using aporia does not pretend to have an answer they don't have. Instead they let the difficulty sit on the page, in full view, so the reader has to carry it forward and work it out for themselves.

Writers reach for aporia when a tidy answer would flatten something that needs to stay open. A neat conclusion can make a hard question feel solved when it isn’t. Aporia keeps the tension alive instead. It respects the reader enough to hand them an unresolved problem rather than a packaged one, and it often does more to change how a reader thinks than a clear argument would, because the reader has to build the thinking themselves instead of just receiving it.

Harold R. Johnson, a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation in northern Saskatchewan, builds an entire passage around aporia in his book The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era (Biblioasis, 2022). He starts telling a story about a snake, the kind of story he says could make a listener want to tear their own skin off. Partway through, he stops. He explains that certain stories carry real power and real risk, and that a knowledge keeper only passes a sacred story to someone who has asked for it and is ready to carry it responsibly. Then he tells the reader: “No. I am not going to tell it to you now.” He never does. The chapter ends with the question of the story itself left open, on purpose, and the reader has to sit with what that refusal means.

That refusal is the whole point. Johnson could have told the story and explained afterward what it meant. Instead the withheld story becomes the lesson. A reader who wants a resolved, explained passage does not get one, and that discomfort makes the reader do something a full explanation never would: think through respect, protocol, and the real power a story can carry.

As you read Johnson's excerpt in the next section, notice exactly where he chooses not to answer something, and pay attention to what that choice asks of you as a reader.

What is Johnson's actual reason for refusing to tell the snake story, in his own words? And what does the piece gain by leaving that story untold instead of finally revealing it at the end?

Vocabulary

Aporia: a moment where a writer raises a genuine question or difficulty and deliberately leaves it open instead of resolving it, so the reader has to work through it themselves.

Protocol: the set of cultural rules governing how and when a story may be told, often including who is allowed to tell it, who it can be told to, and under what conditions.

Withholding: a writer's choice to leave out information the reader expects, using the absence itself to make a point.

Trickster: a recurring figure in many Indigenous oral traditions whose stories test and unsettle fixed rules and expectations, often through disruption rather than resolution.

Sacred story: a story that carries cultural or spiritual weight beyond entertainment, often governed by specific protocols about who may tell it and when.

Further Reading

This lesson builds on the questioning and position-taking skills you will use for the rest of the course. Once you have read Johnson’s excerpt in full, you will generate your own set of open questions about it, take a position on one of them, and then work out at least two different ways someone might read the piece. Your AI companion for this lesson is there to complicate your thinking, not settle it for you.