How Does Nabokov Use Vivid Language In The Virgin Suicide

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The Virgin Suicides immediately fill the reader's heart and mind with beautiful prose from the first page and onwards. The vivid and dream like language is fluid and continuous throughout the book, helping to paint an almost fairy tale like story of the Lisbon girls. Akin to books like Lolitia by Vladimir Nabokov, which although focusing on rather macabre subjects do so in such a beautiful way that the reader does not realize the extent of the tragedy until they are done and can reflex about the novel. In an interview Eugenides says that when he wrote this work he focused on the language so much, writing the story sentence by sentence (Harris). Compared to his later works The Virgin Suicides is almost solely dependent on the prose rather than the plot, …show more content…

. .memories of the Lisbons recalled in almost creepy detail by their now-middle-aged admirers, still struggling to piece together an explanation for their deaths. The guys' nostalgia glorifies the sisters now as much as their boyish hopes and dreams did when it all began. . .” (Gevinson). Many find fault with this glorification, as for one it my mean to some that suicide is a beautiful event, since the death scenes in the book are written in such lovely language. On page 27 after the first death of the book, 13 year old Cecilia, Eugenides writes, “It didn’t matter whether her brain continued to flash on the way down, or if she regretted what she’d done, or if she has time to focus on the fence spikes shooting toward her. Her mind no longer existed in any way that mattered . . . for that moment everyone remained still and composed, as though listening to an orchestra . .” (Eugenides). This scene is not one that is gory or scary as one would think a girl being impaled on a fence would be. Instead, the tone is more dreamlike and heavenly, as if the event is not nearly as gruesome as in reality it would

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