One of the best descriptions of closure – or rather, of the pain of its absence – I’ve ever read is in The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers’ novel of 1946, in which a 13-year-old girl wanders, dislocated, around her home town in the American south, and overhears a horn playing. The music crescendoes, taking her heart with it, and just before the end of the piece, when the jagged phrasing promises to resolve, the player breaks off. She waits for him to restart but he doesn’t and the ache of this moment – “broken, unfinished” – is so unbearable she thinks she’ll go mad.

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I think about this scene a lot, these days, with so many apparent narcissists on the world stage. I don’t just mean Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. This week I watched the extraordinary R Kelly documentary on Netflix, in which the disgraced R&B star, accused by multiple women of sexual assault, swung between hiding in plain sight, angry denial (when the interviewer was a woman), and submissively playing the victim (to a man), but in any case failing at any point to acknowledge wrongdoing. Meanwhile on the news every morning, there was Harvey Weinstein shuffling up the courtroom steps while, behind the scenes, continuing to brief against his alleged victims.

The thing about narcissists is that as long as they have breath in their bodies, they will never surrender their version of reality, a certainty that, with enough exposure, will cause you to doubt your own. This week the articles of Trump’s impeachment were sent up to the Senate and with that came the sense of a musical crescendo, which will almost certainly never reach resolution.

Lev Parnas cheerfully implicated Trump, Pence and everyone else who has denied corrupt dealings with Ukraine

This isn’t just because there aren’t the votes in the Senate for impeachment, but because Trump will never concede. The possibility of a smoking gun is particularly cruel in this context, raised on Wednesday in the form of Rudy Giuliani’s right-hand man, Lev Parnas, who cheerfully implicated Trump, Pence and everyone else who has denied corrupt dealings with Ukraine. Meanwhile there was Trump on TV, making a speech of such staggering lunacy it was impossible to synthesise the two realities.

Weinstein will never admit to wrongdoing, Trump will never acknowledge a reality that contradicts his own. Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in what felt like a final act of spite towards his victims, and none of us will ever have closure. The therapeutic adage one goes through in these instances is that you can only control what you can control; that closure is a property of one’s internal reckoning, not a gift to be given by others. Still, the ache of the unfinished phrase can feel, at times, unbearable.

In The Member of the Wedding, Frankie stands on the pavement agog at what the unseen musician has done to her. “She felt she must do something wild and sudden,” writes McCullers, and to that end, raises a fist and hits herself in the head. It doesn’t make her feel better.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist