Darkness and Decay

(p.141-p.143) How does Eugenides capture the atmosphere of darkness and decay in this extract and why is this significant in the novel as a whole?

In the successful novel the virgin suicides, Jeffrey Eugenide’s uses a range of devices to conceptualize what’s going on inside the Lisbon’s house and capture the sense of isolation and how he personifies their house and the environment surrounding it. This causes the reader to actually feel the atmosphere of darkness and picture the decay, and the light flickering out, inside the Lisbon’s house and within the girl’s themselves.

The author’s choice of narrator was most interesting considering the content of the novel. It is narrated by collective memories of a group of boys who were hopelessly smitten by the five Lisbon sisters who lived in their neighborhood twenty years ago. Still obsessed with the legacy that the girls left behind, the group of boys had collected evidence and interviews while attempting to piece together the girl's last moments. Much making them turn obsessed with the issue. So much like the girls the boys to became terminally ill in pursing the aim from teenage years on discovering why the girls did what they did. The method of narration seemed to mute the anguish that the sister's experienced because for most of the novel they were viewed from a bedroom window. The more the girls were out of reach the more the boys were desperate to know more about them.We as readers are just as helpless as the boys are as we watch the Lisbon girls self destruct and decay.

Chapter four first starts off with Lux’s sexual promiscuity “sightings of Lux making love on the roof”. The boys are mystified by her ability to access the free world beyond her house arrest. Her physical pr...

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...bon’s recover. Instead, the community's backing of the Lisbon girls’ isolation suggests a way of selfishness by keeping the ones in need away from them. This presents the whole neighborhood as people with dark hearts in them and a society and atmosphere that is being destroyed and is slowly decaying by greed and selfishness.

They even spoke to the Lisbon girls own mother and described her as a person who has taken in her life more than she could ever handle “her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable” and the experience had given her early features of old age and decay “her gums had receded”. It shows that since the suicides Mrs Lisbon has spent the rest of her life in grief and on long lonely path of darkness for the loss of her daughters.

However strangely she doesn’t take the blame for the death of her daughters and the decision to take them out of school