Everything is Illuminated, Lesson 6

Lesson 6

Wrapping up: Everything is Illuminated

1. Plot structure

How do you think the structure of this novel is different than a traditional plot structure of introduction, rising action, climax, and resolution?

Where do you think the climax is in this book?

2. Character development

We've talked before about how Alex character changes. How does his grandfather's character change?

a. change in views / treatment of Jewish people

● forces waitress to apologize to Jonathan for calling him a Jew

b. attempt to reconcile himself with his past

● “We are not looking for his grandfather. We are looking for Augustine. She is not any more his than ours” (220)

What is the grandfather looking for?

● “I do not believe in Augustine. No, that is not what I mean. I do not believe in the Augustine that Grandfather was searching for. The woman in the photograph is alive. I am sure she is. But I am also sure that she is not Hershel, as Grandfather wanted her to be, and she is not my grandmother, as he wanted her to be, and she is not Father, as he wanted her to be. If I gave him money, he would have found her, and he would have seen who she is really is, and this would have killed him” (242).

3. The role of fiction

a. We've talked about how this book differs from traditional forms of fiction because it reveals itself as a work of fiction and a work that is in progress rather than complete or finished.

b. The book also thinks about what the role of fiction is in our lives: we all tell stories to ourselves to make sense out of our existence. The creation and revision of stories is a part of life, and the book exposes this through the way it is written: it reveals the creation and revision of its story.

c. Fiction comes out of nothing, but creates something that exists that could produce meaning

● “She told him stories of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad non-truths, even, but he nodded, and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences (230).

● “Safran lay in bed trying to string the events of his seventeen years into a coherent narrative, something that he could understand, with an order of imagery, and intelligibility of symbolism” (260).

d. Another way the novel departs from traditional ways of storytelling is the way in which the way the book is written suggests that writing and language is unable to communicate certain things: this suggests a lack of faith in language to convey meaning

● think about Lyotard's idea of “incredulity towards metanarratives” that we talked about at the beginning of the course

● stream of consciousness style when Grandfather is talking about what happened with Herschel, words are mashed together (248- 250)

● use of .... before Trachimbrod is destroyed as if there is an attempt for the writing style to slow down time (270-271)

● use of parentheses ( ) to include / make things present that were absent from the conversation about Herschel (246)

● end of the novel breaks of midsentence: does not continue on to say what will happened next

● the destruction of Trachimbrod is not part of the actual narrative but is part of someone's dream that is recorded in The Book of Recurrent Dreams (272)

What do all these events that are being described have in common?

4. Collapse of past, present, and future

a. We've talked before about the how the novel confused a clear sense of past coming before the present and present coming before future

b. In the last section of the novel, we have people trapped in the past and unable to move forward in their lives when tragic events are looming

● “Activity was replaced with thought. Memory” (258-263).

5. Impossibility of love

● We saw this theme before with Yankel and with Brod, and we see this theme again with Safran

● I don't love you, he told her one evening as they lay naked in the grass (234).

● Alex response to this is quite insightful (240)

● Eventually, Safran's first experience of love is “by chance” (263) and he is in love with the future

● This experience of being in love is the experience of being caught in an in-between state (261 – 263-264)

6. The title

What does the title of the novel mean? What things are illuminated? What is gained and lost by illumination?