Comparing The Narrator In The Virgin Suicides And Love Medicine

The narrator, or sometimes narrators, plays a crucial role in telling the story that is presented on the pages of the novel. In Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, the young teenage boys in a small community experiences the loss of the Lisbons sisters’ – Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia – and investigates (and becomes obsessed with) the sisters’ suicides. In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, the death of June Morrissey, a young Chippewa woman, causes the members of the Kashpaw and the Lamartine families to reflect on their past experiences. While each novel has similarities and differences in their styles of narration, each narrator has one main purpose: to make the readers feel connected and present in the events in which the

readers understand the meaning of communities in both novels.
Both The Virgin Suicides and Love Medicine share a common quality in their narration styles by the characters witnesses the same events but each experiences the events differently.
In The Virgin Suicides, for instance, the group of boys questions two women, Mrs.

Lily Scheer and Mrs. Joan Buell about their visit to the Lisbons’ house the day Cecilia was brought home from the hospital. While the women were consistent about taking “a Bundt cake in sympathy” for the family, both women recall two different accounts of how the family interacted with them. Mrs. Buell remembers that “Mrs. Libson refused to acknowledge any calamity… ‘As soon as Lily and I took over that Bundt cake, that woman told the girls to go upstairs. We said, ‘It’s still warm, let’s all have a piece,’ but she took the cake and put it the refrigerator. Right in front of us.’ ” On the other hand, Mrs. Scheer states that “ ‘The truth is, Mrs. Libson thanked us quite graciously. Nothing seemed wrong at all…Mrs. Libson invited us out to the sun room and we each had a piece of cake.” She even makes a note that “Joan disappeared at one point” (Eugenides 15). Because the narrators present both accounts, the readers have to decide who is telling the truth. If Mrs. Buell is telling the truth, then Mrs. Scheer fabricated her story to make the Libsons seem more pleasant for whatever reason, but if Mrs. Scheer is telling the truth, then Mrs. Buell was not even present for part of the visit, meaning she would not have happened while she was absent and would not have an accurate

testimonial.
In Love Medicine, Nector’s and Lulu’s experience with the house fire is a prime example. Unintentionally, Nector catches her house on fire after he “crumples it (the letter he wrote to Lulu) in a ball, throw it down” and “[threw] down [his] half-smoked one still lit on the end” on the balled up letter. Eventually, the fire spreads to the house and becomes “unstoppable” (Erdrich 140-141) and leaves the scene. Lulu, who sees “the flames shooting out of the black liquid,” she arrives at the house and “ran in a beeline wasting no breath, no time” because she had left Lyman in the house. While she could not find her son in the house at first, she, with “a mother’s heart[,] was certain that her son was in the house.” After finding him, the two made it out of the house safely and unharmed (Erdrich 282-283). While the two characters witnessed the same house in flames, the two experiences the house fire in different ways and inform readers of new information about the event. For Nector, he takes away doubt and regret from the fire. Before the fire occurred, Nector starts had written letters for Marie, which he wrote that he was leaving her for Lulu, and for Lulu, which tells her that he wants to be with her. While he desires to be with Lulu, he could not stop thinking about Marie and starts to doubt whether he had made the right decision. Starting to regret leaving Marie and writing the letters, his reminiscing over his desires makes him unaware of his minor and thoughtless actions what ultimately starts the fire. For Lulu, she perceives the fire as a feeling of loss and hopelessness. While the readers knows how the fire started through Nector’s experience, they learn through Lulu’s experience that Lyman, unaware to Nector, was in the house when the fire started. She makes the comment, once she and Lyman were out of the house, that “there was nothing to do but stand and watch it burn” (Erdrich 283). Despite their lives being spared, she knows that her house that she had raised her family in and was full of memories was engulfed with flames, leaving her family with only the clothing on their backs and nowhere else to call home. Whether the information that is offer to the readers is new and important or conflicting and contradictory, the narrators are similar in how they describe certain events with diverse experiences.
The two novels also have their unique narrative voices that sets each of them apart that helps. The Virgin Suicides presents the narrative with an investigative plural narrator, using first-person plural pronouns, that presents various types of evidence to the readers, objectively yet analyzing the data collected. For example, the boys “provides” the readers “a few documents from the time (Exhibits #13 – #15) – Therese’s chemistry write-up, Bonnie’s history paper on Simone Weil, Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. ed.” (Eugenides 101). Like in any case, the investigative narrator analyzes every bit of evidence they acquired, even Lux’s handwriting. They take note that “she always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the tow beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and the barbed-wire x” (Eugenides 101). In most court cases, handwriting is usually analyzed for evidence of forgery or fraud, in which this case this is Lux forging her mother’s handwriting. Through the narrative voice of the boys, the readers acquire the feeling of actually being in a courtroom and hearing the narrators present their evidence to the people in the court.
On the other hand, Love Medicine’s style of narration is a short story cycle, also known as a short story sequence. Forrest Ingram describes a short story cycle as “a set of short stories linked to each other in such a way as to maintain balance between the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit” (Wong 171). Similarly, Robert Luscher calls a short story sequence as “a volume of stories, collected and organized by their author, in which the reader successively realizes underlying patterns of coherence by continual modifications of his [or her] perceptions of pattern and themes” (Wong 172). Throughout the novel, the members of the two families share their stories that reveals several details relating to one conflict of the story, such as the identity of Lipsha’s mother. During Albertine’s narration at the beginning of the novel, Lipsha told Albertine, who knows who his mother is, that he could “never forgive what she (his mother) done to a little child” (Erdrich 39), which was that his mother was about to throw him, as an infant, into a slough before being rescued by Marie, his grandmother. While the reader knows that his Aunt June is actually his mother, Lipsha does not, making the readers anticipate for the moment that he finds out the truth. He eventually learns the truth about his mother when he visits King and Lynette after signing up for the army, noting that he “had a feeling [his] mother would have wanted [him] to do.” The comment made the two “[uncomfortably] quiet and gave each other a quick glance” (Erdrich 298), making Lipsha aware of their knowledge of his mother’s identity: June. He changes his feelings towards his mother and sees the “good in what she did for [him]” and “was lucky she turned [him] over to Grandma Kashpaw” (Erdrich 333). Through Lipsha’s narratives, the readers finally reach the moment of his realization of his mother’s identity and sees the gradual change of Lipsha’s mindset and attitude towards his mother that starts in hatred but ends with acceptance.
The effect of each of the novels helps readers construct the meaning of each novel. The narrators of The Virgin Suicides make the readers feel as if they are a part of an investigation. The narrators share of an eye-witness account from Mrs. Pitzenberger, a neighbor to the Lisbons, about the moments prior to Cecilia’s suicide. She recalls that she “ ‘thought they were sending her on a trip,…She was carrying a suitcase.’ No suitcase was ever found. We can only explain Mrs. Pitsenberger’s testimony as the hallucination of a bifocal wearer, or a prophecy of the later suicides where luggage played such a central motif” (Eugenides 43). For the readers, their “job” is to decipher truth. If there was a suitcase, why would Cecilia have a suitcase prepared or set out right before her death? Since there was not suitcase ever discovered to answer this question, the jury moves on to the next question: why would Mrs. Pitsenberger claim to see Cecilia with a suitcase? While the narrator tells the readers that suitcases would be significant in the future suicides of the other sisters, the readers has to consider that this conflicting detail, although coincidental, of Mrs. Pitsenberger’s account could either be the truth or just an optical illusion.
Love Medicine’s effect of narration makes the readers feel as if they are a part of their community and even shares their secrets, such as the truth of Henry Junior’s death. After Henry returned from the war, his family begins to see a change in him that “was no good” (Erdrich 182) and “his mind gave way” as if “something broke in him”(Erdrich 284). Sometime after coming home, Henry and Lyman went on a trip to the Red River, where Henry jumps in the river and gets caughts in the currents saying, “My boots are filling” that Lyman comments that “he says this in a normal voice” (Erdrich 189) before Henry disappeared in the water. When he tells his mother a fabricated story Henry’s death, saying that the car went out of control before it ended up in the river, Lulu senses the “a false note in his voice, and [she] knew that he had planned to say” because she “knew that no accident would have taken Henry Junior’s life” (Erdrich 285). Because the readers experience Henry’s death alongside Lyman, they know that Lulu’s motherly instincts, who had also seen Henry’s change, is right when she knows he is not telling her the truth. Because the members of the community shares their thoughts and secret feelings through their narration, the readers can take the information learned through one section of narration and connect it with the narration of another character, having the only full access to each character’s experience that the other characters does not. This creates the readers’ sense of being a crucial member of the community because they have a full understanding of what is going on around them.
To conclude, the roles of the narrators of The Virgin Suicides and Love Medicine is creating connections with the reader to the events. Despite their differences, the narration of the novels allows readers to construct their meanings. Whether it is a group of teenage boys or the many voices of a community, the role of the narrator is important in telling their stories. Without narrators, how can stories be told and shared with the world?

Work Cited
Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009. Print.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides. New York: Time Warner Books, 1993. Print.
Wong, Hertha D. Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: Narrative Communities and the Short Story Sequence. n.d. Web. 7 April 2018.