Now that I have finished The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, I have more philosophical insight on the plot, characters, and themes. One point I want to discuss is about the neighborhood boys/the narrators, who are fixated on the Lisbon girls and their story. They spend their whole lives watching the girls, then studying what the they left behind after they are gone. But what the boys realize later is that they barely knew them at all. The Lisbon girls' suicides on the eve of Cecelia's suicide attempt brings up a philosophical point because of their willingness to assist each other in the case that one of their attempts fails. If it came to this point, is it murder? Does it matter that they are sisters?
The boys have a gallery of things relating to the girls, ranging from photographs to diaries to brassiere. Because of all of this, the boys imagine that they know the Lisbon girls very well. In fact, they don't, which may be why they still don't know the truth about the suicides. Probably the most crucial moments in the book occur when the boys are invited to the Lisbon's house on the eve of Cecilia's attempted suicide. They don't know exactly what to expect, but what they never saw coming were Bonnie's shoes swinging from a rope and Lux's dead body, shotgun, in her mother's car. The boys' realizations are summed up in two lines: "We had never known [them]. They had brought us here to find that out." But how do you know when you know someone? The boys had a huge scrapbook of the girls' lives, and seemed to know and care even more than Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. But the boys were always on the outside, looking in, while the girls' parents knew them on a more personal level. This is related to the question about what your "self" is. Are you more your body or your mind? Of course our minds control our bodies, but can you know somebody just because you know what they look like? If somebody asks me if I know a certain person, I will say yes if I've seen them a few times and maybe talked to them before. The boys have done so much more than that, but I'm still not sure if you can say that they knew the girls. To really know someone, you have to know their personality and the things that go on inside of their head that they wouldn't tell just anybody. So while I would tell somebody that I know the person, I'm really just saying that I know who they are referring to. The boys know the girls only on a certain level, from watching them over the years, with only fleeting glances of what was actually going on inside their heads.
The same scene where the boys realize that they never knew the Lisbon girls is a very different philosophical dilemma from the girls' point of view. Suicide is obviously a very prominent presence in the whole story, and captured my attention on the first few pages when I learned of the Lisbon's religious beliefs. The boys (along with the whole town and reader) question why the girls commit suicide overall, but I want to focus in on the fact that they all killed themselves together, not one by one. That means that they planned it, and that makes me wonder if they all wanted to do it, because we know in the end that they all have different personalities; they're not one unit like they seemed at the beginning. One line that stuck out was: "They were ready to assist one another, if need be." This is related to assisted suicide, but is it different because they aren't medical professionals? Because they are young? Because they are sisters? I think being young makes it worse, because they aren't as wise and cultured, especially because they are locked up in their prison day after day. They probably don't realize that it could get better if they tried hard enough and/or waited it out. On the contrary, I think being sisters makes it better because I would assume they would do what was best for each other, because they are blood. I have still not come to a conclusion about how I feel about their willingness to help one another, but I know that I would have never been able to assist one of my sibling if it came to that.
I really enjoyed this book and the philosophical ideas it presented, with suicide and self being only two of many.
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