Manuscripts and stories become a motif for the act of Bargaining with Reality to Reinvent the Self. Consumed by his own quest to understand himself via the narrative of his life, Fogg even goes by the nickname “M.S.,” which is a common abbreviation for “manuscript.” As Uncle Victor comments, “Every man is the author of his own life […] The book you are writing is not yet finished. Therefore, it’s a manuscript” (7). To further cement these ideas, the novel presents two other manuscripts that are designed to be compared against Fogg’s own life. The first is the autobiography that Effing tasks Fogg with compiling. In contrast to Fogg, who is still writing his life’s story, Effing is concerned with recording his past experiences for posterity, believing that they deserve a wide audience. As Fogg listens to Effing’s stories, he judges them to be too outlandish to be fully true, but he accepts them for the emotional power that they convey. Effing’s manuscript, whether true or not, resonates with Fogg’s personal experiences, but ironically, the manuscript is rejected when Fogg submits Effing’s obituary and feature article to a magazine, as the accounts are considered to be too insubstantial to be worthy of their readers’ attention.

The other manuscript is Solomon’s novel, Kepler’s Blood. Whereas Effing uses his manuscript to paint himself as a larger-than-life figure, Solomon uses his own novel to articulate the impact of his father’s absence on his life, effectively exorcising those feelings and accepting himself in a radical way. Unlike Effing, Solomon is uninterested in recording his thoughts for posterity. Fogg himself finds Solomon’s novel to be a compelling glimpse into Solomon’s psychology. The fact that he abandons fiction writing to explore adjacent topics in historical scholarship suggests that Solomon has moved away from his concerns with his father’s impact on his identity. Collectively, Effing and Solomon’s respective manuscripts and life perspectives offer Fogg two vastly different models for writing his own story.