The characters of Afire confront a crisis that threatens to vacate all narratives of meaning, and Leon comes out the other end with a feeble text. It’s better than what came before, but can it begin to make sense of what has taken place? This time, the atrocity is not historical but natural, and Petzold is cynical about the redemptive potential of melodrama in an age in which disasters, if still largely caused by human decisions, unfold beyond the grasp of our control. If he wants Leon to scrutinize the stories he tells about himself, the ending of Afire suggests that there is a possibility he finds even more concerning: a future with no stories at all.