The Virgin Suicides and the Writing Self

The Virgin Suicides and the Writing Self

Usually our voice for telling a story is our own writing self. A person that understands the situation at hand and speaks in a manner relevant to the situation. We don't normally create a separate narrator to make our writing more interesting. We simply write our thoughts and opinions to convey our ideas. But Jeffery Eugenides writing the Virgin Suicides brought out a separate part of himself to narrate for him. An entirely fabricated group to speak the story of the girls. This helped both the writer and the reader in their reality separation. We read it and feel totally immersed in the fiction of the novel. Throughout it we can relate to this group of narrators in their description of the girls. We see their slightly biased selection of quotes and feel that they are just as normal as we are.

The writer telling the story has a much easier time of thinking about the facts of the reality he has created when he is fictionally an active member of it. Although his narrators are not his normal voice, they are still a part of his writing self. They still must go through the filter of his conscious thought to be allowed to write the story. This means that when the reader is engaged in the process of comprehending this story, they unnoticeably bring together three separate filters. The author's, the narrators', and their own.

This voice creates a story within a story. They describe the lives of a suburban group of people in a dramatized tragedy. The characteristics of the narrators' story reflects how they are able to convey a sense of sereneness in a time of pain. They make the reader unexpectedly interested and ...

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