We cannot know how another person feels. Perhaps in the age of “empathy workshops” this is a disappointment, but at a deeper level of human behavior it is probably both a relief and a tragedy. “Thank God,” some will say, “that we have no responsibility for the true experiences of others, that we don’t have to worry about them, that it’s not our problem.” These limits of consciousness are an essential and seemingly overlooked component of the human experience that leads to all kinds of frustrations and discontents. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides explores this unfortunate desire and the idea of ​​"limits of consciousness" is the cornerstone of the novel's meaning. The Virgin Suicides tells the story of five sisters who all end up committing suicide. Except that's not the case. If this were true, the plot of the book would not be revealed in the first sentence (nor in the title). The story does tell the death of the Lisbon sisters, but these girls are not the main characters and the story does not belong to them. Death occupies an important place in the story, but it is not the death of the girls that is lamented. The death of a community, the death of a city, the death of a dream, and the death of a country hover over the pages of this book, making adolescent suicide seem unimportant. The story is truly about a faceless, nameless, numberless group of neighborhood boys who spend their lives obsessing over the Lisbon sisters before and long after their disappearance. But, due to the limits of their consciousness, the boys cannot understand the girls or their situation until it is too late - and even then, the deaths only prolong an adolescent obsession indefinitely. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay While the boys yearn to understand Lisbon, the community ignores them. The few attempts to contact them after the death of their youngest sister are superficial and ineffective. The wretched story is set in a middle-class Detroit suburb in the 1970s, a decaying bubble containing a closed, cloistered community. This community is determined to preserve the bourgeois banality that it holds dear and yet it is in deep decline and it is the community's narrow-mindedness, the inability to even try to push the boundaries of consciousness, which is the problem. a quality that rejects and isolates a grieving family like the Lisbons, and contributes to the decadence that permeates the book; a dying organism trying to survive by collapsing in on itself. The Lisbon sisters were dying and a group of neighborhood boys couldn't understand it until the girls' deaths became the boys' death sentence. The Lisbon sisters die and no one wants to know because they can't accept that they too are dying. Virgin Suicides delves into the heart of American despair and tells us about the dying who refuse to bury the dead. Although the book begins (and ends) with Mary's suicide, the second paragraph of the novel dives directly into Cecilia's first suicide attempt – the youngest in Lisbon and the first to take her own life. On first readings, as one slips into the story, it's easy to forget who the book is really about - the boys - but a closer look at this paragraph reveals less about Cecilia than about the reactions others towards it and therefore constitutes a microcosmic example. of the hidden plot of the story. “Cécilia, the youngest, only thirteen years old, had left first,opening her wrists like a stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, adrift in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of a woman possessed and her small body giving off the smell of a mature woman, the paramedics had were so frightened by its tranquility that they remained hypnotized. But then Mrs. Lisbon rushed inside, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bathmat; Mr. Lisbon's razor sank into the toilet bowl, marring the water." (1) The reaction of the paramedics is unusual. It is the job of an ambulance to rescue people in difficulty. They rush all the way day and see all kinds of strange and horrible situations They are trained to act immediately. What kind of paramedic is "hypnotized" by anything on the job? And why would anyone be "hypnotized" by sight? of a half-dead child? Wouldn't you scream? Wouldn't you try to help? Just like the boys, for the majority of the book, remain strangely fascinated by the Lisbons, always obsessed and lusting after them? clearly mourning a family member and becoming increasingly isolated by their community and mother, the boys don't realize the truth of the situation until it's too late, and the paramedics must be too. driven to action by screams and blood. The situation has to “reaffirm” itself, which also makes no sense. The situation of a thirteen year old girl surrounded by her own blood is not one that should be reaffirmed. The situation of four grieving sisters locked in a dilapidated house with a potentially abusive mother is not one that should be reaffirmed. be reaffirmed. In this first chapter, it quickly becomes clear to any reader that these boys objectify and project their own ideas and fantasies onto the girls of Lisbon, and are unable to understand them for this reason. Their observations are tinged with idealization and the events clearly unimportant. "...[Ms. Lisbon] checked each girl for signs of makeup before allowing her into the car, and it was not unusual for her to send Lux ​​back inside to put on a less tellingly none of us went to church, so we had plenty of time to observe them, the two parents washed out with color, like photographic negatives, and then the five girls sparkling in their homemade dresses, all made of lace. and flying, overflowing with their fertile flesh. (6) Here, also in the opening pages, the boys observe an extremely controlling mother (whose forceful nature only gets worse as the novel progresses), but the boys focus on their ability to watch over them and " bring fruit to the flesh.” Their behavior at Cecilia's party is another example. After Cecelia unsuccessfully attempts suicide and Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon allow her to have a party, she is clearly still ill. At the party, she is described as sitting off to the side and looking at her punch glass, still dressed in her old wedding dress, with bracelets stuck to her suicide scars "...[acting] like a nobody." wasn't there." (24) This image seems to be the epitome of what a person looks like just before they are about to commit suicide, which they do, in the middle of the party. The sentence that follows this description is "We knew." stay away from her." (24) Until Cecelia jumps, the boys only talk about their enthusiasm for the other Lisbon sisters, and whether or not the sisters are the same as in the "bedroom fantasies" of the boys and spend the party trying to impress the girls by making fun of "Retard Joe".reader that everything about the party is wrong, and indeed, throwing a party when a family member has just attempted suicide is strange. But the boys don't recognize or even think about what the party could mean. When they receive their invitations, all they can think about is what the girls must have thought of them. Boys are obsessed with girls, but their objectification and fantasies prevent them from understanding them, let alone helping them. This is significant, because after Cecilia's death, while the boys remain obsessed with the sisters, the community isolates them. They act as if nothing happened. Cecilia's death is listed in municipal records as an accident. The means by which the community attempts to reach out do not fully acknowledge the situation and are completely ineffective. The boys only think about themselves, while the community tries to turn away, but in the end, neither understands Lisbon better than the other. This is why the examples of boys letting their fantasies about girls get in the way of their understanding of the situation are significant, because if anyone could have understood the Lisbons, it would have been these boys; they spent their adolescence obsessing over them. But they couldn't. These are the limits of consciousness. We will never understand each other. Whatever we do, something will get in our way. After Cecilia's death, the Lisbon house is filled with flowers. The whole neighborhood sends them, along with sympathy cards. Almost no one goes to see Lisbon. Some men and the priest, Father Moody, leave, but end up talking about football with Mr. Lisbon. Flowers and cards are not real testaments to tragedy, as evidenced by the way the community grapples with them: "[m]ost people opted for generic cards that said 'With sympathy' or ' Our condolences", but some [...] worked on personal responses. (45) Cards and flowers are usual, they send them because that's what they've always done when someone dies and they're motivated to send them because of personal appearances - no one wants to do what hasn't always been done: if you always have personal responses written down, then you should do it. Cecilia's death creates a deep sense of urgency in the community – the urgency that nothing is urgent. Ms. Lisbon also seems to feel this way: “[t]he girls did not miss a single day of class, nor did Mr. Lisbon, who taught with his usual enthusiasm. » Girls don't even get new school uniforms and have to continue wearing old ones that don't fit them. In describing the sisters at school, the narrators contradict themselves: “[t]he recent shock was undetectable, but as they sat down, they left a fold-down seat empty as if to reserve it for Cecilia. » (61) There seems to be a determination to view girls as withdrawn or indifferent, so that there is an excuse not to contact them, not to understand. “Who knew what they were thinking or feeling? Lux was still laughing stupidly, Bonnie was touching the rosary in the pocket of her corduroy skirt, Mary was wearing her costumes that made her look like the First Lady, Therese was keeping her goggles on in the hallways – but they were moving away from us, other girls. , from their father…” (62-63) The girls were always the same, so obviously their emotional states were also the same. In the previous paragraph, Mary Lisbon's former best friend admits to ignoring her after Cecilia's death because Mary "freaked her out." outside." No one makes any real effort to talk to the girls. One of the boys, Mike Orriyo, tries totalk to Mary and fails because he doesn't know what to say. The girls are isolated, but they are not isolating themselves. Lux is the only one talking with many of the other students and, as one of her lovers says, "We weren't really talking if you know what I mean..." This urgency that everything stay as it is, and attempting to do this by ignoring and isolating a grieving family once again speaks to the limits of conscience. The community values ​​self-preservation above helping and, unlike the boys, actively avoids pushing boundaries or trying to figure out what is happening to the sisters. They see a difficult situation and that connecting with someone whose sister has died is a challenge, so they give up. This “scares” them too much. But behind the urgency to do nothing lies the urgency to do anything. It feels like the community wants to do something, but because they can't stand change, their efforts only further isolate the family - the removal of the fence, the raking of leaves. the day of mourning. If we are limited, why should we connect? We will do anything to make you feel better, as long as we don't have to understand why you are this way. It is clear that these limits of conscience – both those of the community and those of the boys – contribute to the disappearance of the sisters of Lisbon. In the fourth chapter, it is clear that the situation the girls find themselves in is dire. The house is literally plunged into darkness by the sheer will of Mrs. Lisbon and is completely dilapidated. Lux's lovemaking on the roof is a cry for help, a performance. Earlier in the novel, just after Cecilia's death, the boys gather on Chase Buell's roof where they hear the sounds of Detroit. “Sounds that we could not usually hear reached us now that we were higher up, and crouching on the tar shingles, chins in hands, we could faintly distinguish an indecipherable band running counter to urban life, screams and screams, the barks of a chained dog, the honking of car horns, the voices of girls shouting numbers in an obscure, tenacious game - the sounds of the poor town we never visited, all mixed together and deafened, senseless, carried by the wind of this place. […] One by one, we all returned home. (31) Perhaps in this story the roofs represent the truth. Above the decaying suburbia, above the refusal to die, above it all, the truth of the world these characters live in is easily visible: their town is in decline and many people of one race and of a different class live closer than they would like. think. Above the dying district, Lux Lisbon is suffering. But they don't think about the city, they go home. And they don't worry about Lux at all - she's a goddess teaching them how to have sex. It becomes clear that everything about the Lisbons secretes death. The girls are starving. The house is rotting. Family members begin to be portrayed as if they were already dead, like zombies: Mary's obsession with makeup and "keeping up appearances" only exaggerates her decline, Lux's rib cage protrudes , Mr. Lisbon goes to work with "fake smiles" and "no longer fortifies himself with a cup of coffee" and ends up resigning from school, Bonnie "is visibly wasting away", wears a blouse made of chicken feathers and prays at the site of Cecilia's death. The house literally begins to fill the neighborhood with the smell of rotting flesh. No one will touch the house anymore. And that's the horrible thing: no one will touch the house. No one will speak to Mr. Lisbon. Person.