Narrative Voice In The Virgin Suicide

In a 2002 interview with BOMB Magazine, American author Jeffrey Eugenides is asked about his penchant for complicated narrative voices in his writing, Eugenides simply states that he “[likes] impossible voices. Voices you don’t hear every day.”(Safran Foer). Indeed Eugenides’ debut novel of 1993, The Virgin Suicides, sees the author adopt a particularly unusual narrative mode i.e. a first person plural perspective. The novel is told from the point of view of a group of now middle aged men, with “thinning hair and soft bellies” as they recount and try to understand the events of one year from their early adolescence, in suburban Grosse Point, Michigan, in the 1970s (Eugenides). As teenagers, the group of men had been, to some degree, obsessed with their neighbours, the five Lisbon sisters – Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese. The girls, aged between 13 and 17 years old at the time, were to the group of young boys enigmatic, and a source of great mystery and sexual desire. Two decades after each of the Lisbon girls have taken their own lives, the men remain fixated on, and perhaps haunted by the events of that year and attempt to understand the girls’ motives for their suicides.

The men’s narrative is supported by and formed from an accumulation of multiple individual memories, the memories of the male narrators themselves and those of several ‘witnesses’. For the most part, these witnesses are other members of the boys’ suburban community, who remember the events surrounding the deaths of the girls, and their second hand accounts also hold sway over the story’s telling. As well as this the narration is supported by and interpreted through a collection of material artefacts from the girls’ lives, including a tube of lipstick, a bra and some old