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  • Essay / Pure melancholy vs. False Happiness: Reading The Virgin Suicides

    In The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides asks the narrators to describe seemingly average everyday events as extraordinary, demonstrating the search for something more meaningful in their uniform lives, designed to be perfect. Through the narrators' exaggerations, it is evident that the boys become more and more obsessed with the smallest details of the Lisbon girl's life until it becomes their top priority. Observing Lisbon becomes their sole purpose in life, causing the boys to stop maintaining the perfect illusion of suburbia that many have tried so hard to maintain. They nostalgically devote their entire lives to dwelling on dead girls, suggesting that the false satisfaction that comes from constructed perfection is actually necessary for suburban happiness. While Eugenides shows the depressing confinement of a perfect suburban life, the boys' exaggerated descriptions ultimately demonstrate that "freedom" is more detrimental; their inescapable infatuation caused by a deviation from the standard way of life depicts their escape into melancholy as a fate worse than false happiness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Eugenides asks the boys to describe average interactions with Lisbon girls as amazing to show their desire to find something important in their typical, boring lives and establish their increasingly damaging obsession . Before the boys knew much about Lisbon girls, Peter Sissen was invited to dinner with Lisbon's family and recounted his experience: "In the trash was a Tampax, spotted, still fresh from inside one of the girls from Lisbon. Sissen said he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn't disgusting but that it was a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something like that…” (8). Their detailed description of the tampon "freshly taken from the inside of one of the Lisbon girls" demonstrates the boys' complete fascination with this unknown object and with the girls themselves. The word “fresh” seems particularly important to them, implying not only recent contact, but also that this recent contact is attractive and seductive. It may be understandable that tampons are foreign to boys, but even girls don't describe them as "beautiful." The word "beautiful" shows their complete adoration for girls, because everything that comes into contact with them is amazing, even a used tampon. The association with a “modern painting” goes beyond even beauty, implying elegance and deeper meaning. The stamp means nothing to girls, but boys view it as amazing and meaningful, displaying their blind admiration for girls from the start. Additionally, the fact that a tampon can mean so much to them means that they don't have many truly meaningful things in their lives, demonstrating the boredom and futility of typical suburban life. Later, all the boys are invited to a party at the Lisbons' house. The boys describe the scene vividly: The steps were steep and metal-spiked, and as we descended, the light below grew brighter and brighter, as if we were approaching the molten core of the earth. By the time we reached the last step, it was blinding... On a card table, the punch bowl exploded lava. The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few seconds the girls of Lisbon were a dazzling spot like a congregation of angels (23). The description of the stairs as being “at“steep, metallic tip” gives hardness and anticipation to the staircase. moment, with the light becoming more and more intense. The idea of ​​"approaching the molten core of the earth" suggests approaching a hellish state, which is further emphasized by "the punch bowl [that] exploded lava" and the descriptions such as “glow” and “metal”. » This contradicts the description of the girls as "a blob of brilliance like a congregation of angels". The association with angels takes admiration to a new level, suggesting that girls are equivalent to something holy and divine. Because visiting Lisbon is not a common thing, the boys stray, even slightly, from their traditional life; however, they immediately descend into hell, demonstrating that defying norms comes with immense consequences. The fact that they see girls as angels is just a simple illusion, boys have placed them on an irrational pedestal; angels could not be found in hell. Their unrealistic description demonstrates their thirst for something fascinating, but their illusion becomes the consequence of their excessive efforts to abandon the mundane norm. After reading Cecilia's diary, the boys say, "We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, how it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you came to know what colors went together." We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skin, and that they knew everything about us even though we couldn't understand them at all” (40). The boys' reaction is extremely dramatic; the word “imprisonment” implies perpetual oppression, and the “active and dreaming” mind implies creativity and irrationality, all of which is fundamentally based on emotion. However, it was previously revealed that Cecilia only described daily events in her diary, such as the meals she and her sisters ate, and never her own emotions. It is ridiculous that boys would feel such a dramatic and passionate shift towards such simple entries, thereby establishing their imagined connection with girls. Furthermore, they believe that the girls are their "twins, that we all exist in space like animals with identical skin..." As the emotional connection with the girls is clearly formed, the idea that they are also physically identical, which “” suggests. The strange description of "animals with identical skin" is also illogical because humans are animals and have skin. "Animals" does indeed imply a natural primal connection, but this is again unlikely given that they draw this conclusion from Cecilia's diary, which was rather superficial. The boys are now deeper in their investigation, as they have gathered written evidence from the girls, revealing their disturbing obsession. While the boys are fascinated by the girls' lives, they ignore their own supposedly perfect lives and move away from the suburban dollhouse lifestyle, until they are ultimately trapped in a cycle of investigation melancholy. Although Eugenides shows this counterfeit happiness and strict perfection in the suburbs. can lead to a feeling of incapacity and confinement among the girls of Lisbon, the descriptions of the boys, who previously expressed a disturbing obsession, become an even more confining infatuation and ultimately demonstrate that deviating from constructed happiness leads to distress inevitable. The boys interviewed Trip years after he was with Lux. They describe their discoveries: "He would just tell us, 'I never got over that girl, man.' Never.' In the desert, with the,.