The Virgin Suicides - English Literature NEA - Narrative

To what extent does the use of male narrative and perspective in ‘The Virgin Suicides’
reduce the sense of tragedy surrounding the Lisbon girls?

The male lens of the narrative, through which we view the suicides of the Lisbon
sisters, could be viewed to lack an element of empathy that such narration should
contain. Written in first person plural, the novel is collectively narrated by an
anonymous group of neighbourhood men reminiscing the striking events of their
early adolescence from the standpoint of middle age. Eugenides utilises the
narrative voice to illustrate stereotypical immature and inexperienced attributes of
adolescent boys, whilst additionally highlighting their capacity for love and pain. The
narration is paradoxically insensitive and sensitive, which may reflect the
retrospective viewpoint the men now have, but could also be viewed as an indication
to the conformable nature of teenage boys. However, it is still arguable as to whether
the male perspective on such sorrowful events can truly express and comprehend
the tragedy of the Lisbon girls.

A feature of the male narrative voice in which reduces the tragedy of the novel is the
unsophisticated tone, mainly utilised in relation to the Lisbon girls. Often rather
vulgar, ‘In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one
of the Lisbon girls.’, the narration maintains a sexualised depiction of the girls;
objectifying them and presenting the boy’s growing obsession and fascination. This
vulgarity, however appropriate in relation to the boy’s adolescence, signifies a lack of
maturity that is conceivably necessary in empathising with the tragedy of the Lisbon
suicides. It is arguable that although the boys contain a yearning to understand the
Lisbon girls, they continue to glorify them; restricting them from viewing the girl’s
grieving as a natural human process, instead presenting it as a romanticised
experience. ‘Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering’ highlights that
although the boys are able to recognise the girl’s grief, they are blinded by their
‘loveliness’ and thus are unable to empathise with the true ‘suffering’ and tragedy
that the girls experience. Eugenides establishes the boys as unreliable narrators;
they are expressing their personal, even false, views upon other people’s lives. As
stated in the critical anthology ‘The point of using an unreliable narrator is indeed to
reveal in an interesting way the gap between appearance and reality, and to show
how human beings distort or conceal the latter.’. The male narration of the novel
epitomises D.Lodge’s statement, as the account of the girls’ grief is hindered by its
inability to capture their essence. The boys lack sufficient knowledge on female
experience to fully draw conclusions on how the Lisbon girls may be feeling,
therefore the unreliable narration reverts to the glorification of the girls and ‘distorts’
the harsh reality of suicide.
However, the immature elements of the narration could be viewed as necessary in
fully capturing the thoughts and emotions of adolescents. The youthful language
used in relation to the poignant topics emphasises the fact that both the boys and the
Lisbon girls were encountering growing up and death simultaneously; heightening
the tragedy of the novel. As quoted in the critical anthology ‘There must be possibility
of discrimination between truth and falsehood within the imagined world of the novel,
as there is in the real world, for the story to engage our interest’. I feel this statement
particularly links to the idea that if the male narration was wholly understanding of
the girl’s circumstances then it would not reflect the ‘real world’ divide between the
pubertal development of men and women. The boy’s attempt to correspond and
harmonise with the girl’s experiences - ‘We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the
way it made your mind active and dreamy… We knew that the girls were our twins,
that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins….’ - is what ultimately
presents them as ‘truthful’; they acknowledge the division and still attempt to
eradicate it by empathising with being a girl. The inclusivity of the language, such as
the plural first person pronoun in ‘we all’, indicates that the boys still view
themselves and the girls as homogenous; an entity that defies societal views of
gender differences.

At the end of the novel the narrator instead suggests that the boys never contained
the capacity to empathise with the Lisbon girls as they did not share the same
mental experiences ‘We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a
razor to her wrists’. It is suggestable that Eugenides may, therefore, be making an
indictment on the fact that it is not social factors such as gender that disable people’s
ability to understand and empathise towards one another, but it is a person's
personal experiences, in which no two people will ever experience in the same way.
Eugenides explicitly distances the boys and the girls through gender. Yet ultimately,
as suggested by the neutrality of the noun ‘creature’, the gender difference does not
debilitate the boy’s capacity to empathise with the Lisbon girls. Instead, it is the boy’s
lack of understanding of the dark and deep rooted emotions that lead one to feel that
suicide is the only escape. However, this does not reduce the sense of tragedy
surrounding the deaths of the Lisbon girls, as it is clear that the men have never
quite moved on. They live arrested as boys, despite their now ‘thinning hair and soft
bellies’, that are still achingly circling around the incurable mystery of what motivated
the girls deaths. As stated by Porter Abbott, H. in the critical anthology ‘Characters,
to put this in narratological terms, have agency; they cause things to happen.
Conversely, as these people drive the action, they necessarily reveal who they are in
terms of their motives, their strength, weakness, trustworthiness, capacity to love,
hate, cherish, adore, deplore, and so on. By their actions do we know them.’ This
applies to the boys, as the novel itself is a homage to their love for the Lisbon girls
and therefore the tragedy is not affected by their narrative identity. In the action of
attempting to reconstruct the last eighteen months of the Lisbon girls lives, we begin
to truly ‘know’ the boys as empathetic humans whose ‘motives, their strength,
weakness, trustworthiness, capacity to love, hate, cherish, adore, deplore, and so
on’ are moulded by the death of the Lisbon girls; which acts as an agent.

In conclusion, the male narrator's attempt to fully animate the past ultimately
intensifies the tragedy of the novel. A larger sense of loss is formed due to the fact
that the narrators felt so dearly and strongly towards the Lisbon girls, inclining the
reader to synchronously feel the same way. Therefore, despite the narrator’s
occasional divergence into male reality and imperfect retelling of events, the novel
itself is written as though the men have devoted their lives to understanding and
empathising with the tragedy of the girl’s death.