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The Virgin Suicides
"Why does Jeffrey Eugenides’ narrate in the first person
plural?"
1. Brief Introduction About the Book;
 The Virgin Suicides is a 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides about the
death of Lisbon sisters in the 1970s. The story is told from the point of
view of a group of teenage boys who are fixated on the beautiful,
sheltered, and enigmatic girls: Bonnie, Mary, Lux, Therese and Cecilia.
The sisters are objects of intense desire among the boys in their school
and neighbourhood, none of whom talk about the girls as actual people,
but rather, as the manifestation of their fantasies. To the boys, the Lisbon
sisters are so perfect precisely because they are abstractions, to be
moulded as wished.
2. What I am going to talk about;
“Writing a novel in first-person plural can’t be easy, but when an author nails it –
like Jeffrey Eugenides did with The Virgin Suicides – it sticks with you. This
narrative technique isn’t the “royal we” or a Greekchorus, but a collective voice that
observes and is also part of the story.”
 The narrative voice comes from the chorus of voices made up of
neighborhood boys. We can't pin down just one boy as the leader or
main voice; they are a collective, almost a Greek chorus, describing a
shared experience. Here they describe the homecoming dance:
“We held their sweaty palms, turning them under the mirrored ball. We lost them in
the vastness of their dresses and found them again, squeezed the pulp of their bodies
and inhaled the perfume of their exertion. A few of us grew brave enough to insert
our legs between theirs and to press our agony against them.” (3.178)

3. Who is ‘We’?
 The “we” is a group of teenage boys who spent a great amount of time
watching and obsessing over the sisters and whose identity is never
revealed to the reader although we know that they lived in the same
neighborhood as the Lisbon’s and some 20 years later, are trying to
piece together the story of their deaths in order to comprehend the
suicides. The number of boys in the novel is intentionally never made
clear.
4. "Why does Jeffrey Eugenides’ narrate in the first
person plural?"
1. Several voices are more credible than one.
The Virgin Suicides is unique in that its narrative voice is first-person plural:
“we” rather than “I”. As the narrative voice is plural, it can seem more
reliable than a singular voice. When a point of view is defended by more
than one person, it appears to be stronger.
"We didn't understand why Cecilia had killed herself the first time and we
understood even less when she did it twice"(32).
2. Differentiationof groups
 The choice of a collective voice shows the distance between the two
groups – the "them" of the girls and the "we" of the boys – at a
particularly vulnerable age.
“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only
that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up
here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of
those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is
deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back
together.”

2.1 Gender Differences
 The first person plural perspective takes away not just the sisters’ voice,
but their agency. Everything we know about them, from what they said
and did to why they did so, is filtered through another, specifically a male,
perspective. If the girls had thoughts, voices and intentions, they are not
anything anyone else was privy to.
 Towards the end of The Virgin Suicides, when the narrators discover the
deaths of the Lisbon girls, Eugenides writes:
“We had never known (them). They had brought us here to find that out.”
 When all we know of someone is what we choose to project onto them,
then that is not a reflection of them at all; it is a reflection of us. This
brings us back to the times when the voices of women were silenced and
only the perspective of men was valid.
“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and
dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that
the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical
skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at
all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they
understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that
seemed to fascinate them.”
3. Be part of the history
 Interestingly enough, the voice evolves along with the timeline and that
"we" slowly involves the reader as part of the voice, as if the narrators
were addressing each other as well as the reader. This gives the reader
the impression of belonging to the group and having been there, too.
 The unique point of view eventually involves the reader as one of the
boys. The feeling of being part of the story creates a haunting vision of
the world.

“We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping
your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while
the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much
about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but
sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to
fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We
felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy,
and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls
were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and
that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We
knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love
and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to
fascinate them.”
4. Youth
 The narrative distance created by the “we” voice in The Virgin
Suicides also corresponds to the novel’s more generalized status
as a swansong to youth and the intensity of first experiences. At
its fine conclusion, “we” has become all middle-aged men who
mourn a lost (adolescent) love. This “we” is generational, too, a
point which becomes clear at the end of the novel:
“Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents
thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals
regarding sex we hadn’t even had… The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was
wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens.”
(Eugenides 231)
5. Racial Discrimination
 In generational terms, however, “we” also relates to a very
particular young adulthood: that of wealthy, white, suburban
Detroit in the 1970s. In other words, just as “we” is gendered and
historically precise, so it is also raced and classed, where “we”
with “our pink faces” (214) stand distinct from “them”: the
dispossessed black communities of inner-city Detroit. In the boys’
world, from which the novel’s gaze never falters, African
Americans are present only as domestics.

6. Conclusion
 “We” is deployed to suggest a process of collective mourning and
memorialization, which commemorates not only the lost girls but
also a vanished era and community. Eugenides achieves this
without relying on nostalgia, using “we” to chronicle, but not
romanticize, the complexities and ambiguities of a particular
generation and society.
 Eugenides has repeatedly identified his fascination with
"impossible narrative voices"—a reference to both The Virgin
Suicides and the more recent Middlesex.

Referências Bibliográficas:
1. Eugenides, Jefrey. (1993). The Virgin Suicides. 5th Edition, Fourth Estate. London.
2. Wandland, Louise. (2011) . “Giving the Sisters a Voice: Telling the Story” in We
Couldn't Fathom Them at All: The Complex Representation of Femininity in Jeffrey
Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. Sweeden: Halmstad University School of Humanities.
Retrieved May 12,
2018,from http://hh.divaportal.org/smash/get/diva2:435753/FULLTEXT02.pdf.
3. “The Virgin Suicides Summary”. Retrieved May 12, 2018,
from https://www.enotes.com/topics/virgin-suicides
4. Kakutani, Michiko. 1993. “Books of The Times; Of Death in Adolescence And
Innocence Lost” . Retrieved May 12, 2018,
from https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/19/books/books-of-the-times-of-death-in-
adolescence-and-innocence-lost.html
5. Shostak, Debra. 2009. "A story we could live with": Narrative Voice, the Reader, and
Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. MFS Modern Fiction Studies. (Volume 55,
Number 4, Winter 2009 pp. 808-832). Baltimore: Purdue University's Department of
English. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/367327
6. Nesbit, TaraShea. 2012. “We can do a lot: the rise of first-person plural narration”.
Retrieved May 12, 2018, from:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/may/14/first-personal-plural-
narration-novels-stories
7. Ganesan, Sharmilla . 2015. “Booked Out: Women and their voices in 'The Virgin
Suicides'”. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from:
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/books/news/2015/03/01/booked-out-women-and-
their-voices-in-the-virgin-suicides/
8. Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008). "Virgin Suicides Narrator Point of View." Shmoop.
Shmoop University, Inc. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from: https://www.shmoop.com/the-
virgin-suicides/narrator-point-of-view.html
9. Unknown. (2012). “Why we like first-person plural … and why we don’t” . Retrieved May
12, 2018, from: https://shelftalkblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/why-we-like-first-
person-plural-and-why-we-dont/
10. Jeffrey Eugenides: Key Facts”. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/virginsuicides/facts/
11. Bookrags. “Jeffrey Eugenides Writing Styles in The Virgin Suicides”: Point of view.
Retrieved May 12, 2018, from: http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-the-virgin-
suicides/style.html#gsc.tab=0
12. Bruno, Christopher. (2015). “ A dream goes on forever: focalization and invocation in
the virgin suicides” Retrieved May 12, 2018, from:
https://consideringfilm.com/2015/06/18/virgin-suicides/

13. Isaak , David . (2009). “POV, Part V: First-Person Plural”. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from:
http://davidisaak.blogspot.pt/2009/04/pov-part-v-first-person-plural.html
14. Maxey, Ruth. (2015). “The Rise of the “We” Narrator in Modern American Fiction”.
Retrieved May 12, 2018, from: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11068

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