Narrative Analysis

By Genevieve M. Nangit
February 26, 2024

The Lost One

This chapter is about Norma Jeane’s experience in Los Angeles Orphans Home in the first few
weeks.

Primary sentence
For there were other children in the Los Angeles Orphans Home more wounded then Norma
Jeane. Even in her hurt and confusion, she perceived this fact. (Page 72)

Sub-primary sentence
None

Supporting sentences
1 After hot dry winds blew out of the deserts for days, unrelenting and pitiless, there Page 71
began to be discovered infants blown with sand and debris into parched drainage
ditches, into culverts and against railroad beds; blown against the granite steps of
churches, hospitals, municipal buildings. Newborn infants, bloody umbilical cords
still attached to their navels, were discovered in public rest rooms, in church pews,
and in thrash bins and dumps. How the wind wailed, days on end — yet this wailing,
as the wind subsided, was revealed as the wailing of infants. And of their older
sisters and brothers: children of two or three wandering dazed in the streets, some
with smoldering clothes and hair. These were children lacking names. These were
children lacking speech, comprehension. Injured children, many badly burned.
Others even less lucky had died or been killed; their little corpses, often charred
beyond recognition, were hastily swept off Los Angeles streets by sanitation
workers, collected in dump trucks to be buried in unmarked mass graves in the
canyons. Not a word to the press or radio! No one must know.

“The lost ones,” these were called, “Those beyond our mercy.”
2 Who had brought her to this place the child could not recall. There were no distinct Page 72
faces in her memory, and no names. For many days she was mute. Her throat was
raw and parched as if she’d been forced to inhale fire. She could not eat without
gagging and often vomiting She was sickly-looking and sick. She was hoping to die.
She was mature enough to articulate that wish: I am so ashamed, nobody wants me, I
want to die. She was not mature enough to comprehend the rage of such wish. Nor
the ecstasy of madness such rage would one day stoke, a madness of ambition to
revenge herself upon the world of conquering it, somehow, anyhow — however any
“world” is “conquered” by any mere individual, and that individual female,
parentless, isolated, and seemingly of as much intrinsic worth as a solitary insect
amid a teeming mass of insects. Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish
myself to spite your love was not then Norma Jeane’s threat, for she knew herself,
despite the wound in her soul, lucky to have been brought to this place and not
scalded to death or burned alive by her raging mother in the bungalow at 88
Highland Avenue.
 Narrative Analysis
By Genevieve M. Nangit
February 26, 2024

3 There was ten-year-old girl whose cot was next to Norma Jeane’s in the girls’ third- Page 73
floor dorm whose name was Debra Mae who’d been raped and beaten (what a hard,
harsh word “rape” was, an adult word; Norma Jeane knew instinctively what it
meant, or almost knew: a razor sound and something shameful to do with between-a-
girl’s-legs-which-you-are-never-supposed-to-show, where the flesh is soft, sensitive,
easily hurt, and it made Norma Jeane faint to think of being struck there, let alone
something sharp and hard pushed in); and there were the five-year-old boy twins
found nearly dead of malnutrition in a canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains, where
they’d been left tied up by their mother as “a sacrifice like Abraham in the Bible” (as
the mother’s note explained); and there was an older girl who would befriend Norma
Jeane, an eleven-year-old called Fleece, whose original name might have been
Felice, who told and retold with lurid fascination the story of her year-old sister
who’d been “banged against a wall until her brains spilled out like melon seeds” by
their mother’s boyfriend. Norma Jeane, wiping her eyes, conceded she hadn’t been
hurt at all.

At least, not that she could remember.

4 If I was pretty enough, my father would come and take me away. Page 73

5 Waiting for Gladys to get out of the hospital so they could like together again. Page 73
Waiting, with a child’s desperate hope overlaid with a more adult fatalist knowledge
she will never come, she has abandoned me, I hate her, even as she was obsessed
with worrying that Gladys wouldn’t know where she’d been taken.
6 Within a few days of her new status as a ward of Los Angeles County, Norma Jeane Page 73
had wept away all the tears she’d had. Used them up too soon.
7 But no one wanted Norma Jeane’s doll. No one stole Norma Jeane’s doll, which was Page 74
bald now, naked and soiled, her wide-open glassy-blue eyes and rosebud mouth
frozen in an expression of terrified coquetry; this “freaky thing” (as Fleece called it,
not unkindly) with which Norma Jeane slept everynight and hid in her bed during the
day like a fragment of her own yearning soul, weirdly beautiful in her eyes though
laughed at and ridiculed by others.

Reference
“Blonde” by Joyce Carol Oates. 2000. 4th Estate: London, UK.