Sunday, August 23, 2009
Inside
What do you make of what we are not shown of Alice’s childhood? We are given detailed accounts of her time with various relatives and hired help, but we don’t learn about her interactions with other children when she is little. Then rather suddenly we learn that she is dating an ever changing string of boys. But even that episode is told from a perspective inside the house. We know she goes to school. Does she have friends? Does she get on well or poorly with the other kids? Why is this left out?
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I found it to be a very curious omission. I mean, on the one hand, she did seem to live in a very adult, kind of sheltered world, so the absence of other kids makes some sense. But, on the other hand, she did go to school and, especially as she moved into her teen years, one would expect her peers to figure more largely in her life than her guardians. There's just, as you all noted, no concrete sense of how she got from point A to point B to point C, as you usually encounter in a coming-of-age story. I'm sure with a writer of this talent that it was intentional, but it's not satisfying.
ReplyDeleteHer mother says, "There is so much about your own life you never know."
Maybe Schutt is working with this notion. She also a first-person narrator, and what someone may find interesting and worth telling about her own life may differ greatly from what outsiders find interesting.
I guess I didn't notice the omission so much until late in the story when we learn about Mr. Early. It dawned on me then that I hadn't read anything about Alice's school or teachers or classmates.
ReplyDeleteThat quote from her mother is really interesting, kc. That does seem to reflect quite a bit on the story itself.