Virgin Suicides 3

Passage:

Page 65

" He drove to school alone, an hour earlier than his late-sleeping, bysed-in daughters. Entering the main door, past the suit of armor (our athletic teams were called the Knights), he went straight into his classroom where the nine planets of our solar system hung from perforated ceiling panels (sixty-six holes in each square, according to Joe Hill Conley, who counted them during class). Nearly invisible white strings attached the planets to a track. Each day they roated and revolved, the whole cosmos controlled by Mr. Lisbon, who consulted an anstronomy chart and turned a crank next to the pencil sharpener. Beneath the planets hung black-and-white triangles, oranges helices, blue cones, and detachable noses. On his desk Mr. Lisbon displayed a Soma cube, solved for all of time in a ribbon of scotch tape. Beside the blackboard a wire clamp helf five sticks of chalk so that he could draw sheet music for his male singing group. He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room."


-This passage is significant because it shows how Mr. Lisbon is searching for a way to control his life. He leaves his home and his daughters behind to escape to a classroom where he is "God". He moves the planets, has his own sink, and can keep his Soma cube "solved for all of time". This situation shows how lost he feels at home and how he feels he has failed as a father/ authority figure in his house. Cecilia's death and the girls behavior is something that he feels he can not ever understand. This allows the girls to drift farther away from everyone and leads us to think about their suicides that have yet to happen.

-Eugenides uses syntax to show how out of touch Mr. Lisbon's character is with reality. By placing the specific details of life surrounding Mr. Lisbon in parentheses within the sentence describing his ways of escaping life, it makes his inability to deal with reality stand out even more. Eugenides constantly includes these specific details throughout the novel in order to show how unnatural the suicides are. The repitition of time-based ideas/ phrases also helps contribute to the idea that death and time are out of Mr. Lisbon's control. "Each day", he controls the planets, his cube is solved "for all of time" and he has been a teacher for "so long". These ideas of time all relate back to the fact that time on earth is limited, Cecilia's time is over, and Mr. Lisbon has no idea how much time he has left with his other daughters.

Virgin Suicides 2

Passage:

"And then Mr. Lisbon replied: 'They'll grow out. Fingernails keep growing. She can't bite them now, dear.'

Our own knowledge of Cecilia kept growing after her death, too, with the same unnatural persistence. Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivd memories of Cecilia."

-This passage allows you to understand Cecilia's character and connect more with her. This passage and the rest of the paragraph show how Cecilia is more alive to those around her after she is dead. It takes her death to get them all to really take interest in their moments with her. The fact that her parents are wondering about her nails when she threw herself out a window, and the fact that the boys never payed this much attention to her when she was alive, allows the reader to see why she was so unhappy with her life. 

-In this passage, again, the author places death next to a casual issue such as nail biting. Eugenides then carries this disturbing idea about her nails continuing to grow over to the next paragraph about the boys' knowledge of Cecilia. The way which their knowledge of Cecilia continues to grow after she is dead also mirrors the way the readers are learning about Cecilia through her death/absence.  This forces the reader to realize the significance of the suicides and encourages him to look harder for the meaning and connections within them.