Either/Or

“Behind a dean’s strained expression you could glimpse some hidden mechanism ceaselessly translating everything you said into an expression of unreasonableness or immaturity.”

Selin feels a kind of outsider status in many of her interpersonal interactions, and this passage is emblematic of that feeling. The dean seems to view students through a reductive lens. Here is another moment in which Selin feels uncomfortable in a formal academic setting in spite of her keen intellect and strong work ethic.

“I picked up a secondhand copy, $7.99, ‘Either, then one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.’ My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?”

This passage speaks to the theme of Literary Analysis and Self-Examination. It is largely through books that Selin learns to understand herself and those around her. This text is one of her primary evaluative touchstones within the novel, and it will be through reading Kierkegaard that she comes to better understand her relationship with Ivan.

“The sense of discovering a total deception in the absence of the person who created it; the fact that the deception itself was specifically tailored for one other person using words that seemed meaningful but had actually occurred randomly in the environment; the confusing fact that the random words in the environment thus did have a special meaning, though they got it somehow retrospectively, all rose in my chest and prevented me from breathing.”

In this moment, after watching the film The Usual Suspects, Selin truly comes to understand how deceptive Ivan had been during their “relationship.” So many of her “aha!” moments happen as a result of literary analysis; although in this case, she analyzes a film, her process is still emblematic of how she looks to cultural products for psychological insight into the motivations of others.

“I loved Tatiana, because she didn’t hide what she felt, and I loved Pushkin for calling out the kind of people who conflated discretion and virtue.”

This passage speaks to Selin’s characterization. It is emblematic of the way that she analyzes (and overanalyzes) literature in order to understand her own life and the lives of others. It also speaks to her preference, according to Svetlana, for aesthetics over ethics. There is much about what other people see as ethical or virtuous that she finds unappealing.

“I stood up, more abruptly than I had intended. ‘I have to go,’ I blurted. Everyone looked at me, so I added: ‘I just remembered a book I have to read.’”

This passage speaks to Selin’s characterization. Although she does maintain several close friendships and many acquaintanceships, she tends to find conversation emotionally taxing. She is much more comfortable in the world of literature than in social situations.

“What if I could use the aesthetic life as an algorithm to solve my two biggest problems? How to live and how to write novels.”

This passage speaks to the theme of Literary Analysis and Self-Examination. Selin finds both her own experiences and other people’s motivations baffling. It is only through literary analysis that she comes to understand anything about psychology and the “human condition.” Here, she plans to use Kierkegaard’s Either/Or as a rubric for understanding both her own life and how to write about it.

“I didn’t see the point of debating how to respond to an axe murder saying something that an axe murderer would literally never say. More broadly, I mistrusted the project of trying to generalize a set of rules that would work in all circumstances.”

This passage speaks to Selin’s particular way of approaching life and literature: She is not as interested in “the big picture,” in thematic structure, or in abstract analysis. She is much more moved by well-developed characters and the way that authors represent interpersonal interactions. This pronounced leaning in her approach reflects her difficulties in gaining value from her classes, playing into the theme of Education Versus Learning.

“Dora filled me with despair. What if someone told me that it was my sexual motivations behind all my problems?”

This passage also speaks to the theme of Literary Analysis and Self-Examination. Selin is filled with despair after reading Freud’s text because, as she does with everything that she reads, she finds many troubling parallels to her own life. It is only through reading all of these books, however, that she comes to understand her relationship with Ivan.

“‘Who wants to understand Finnegan’s Wake though,’ I said?”

This passage speaks to Selin’s unique way of looking at the world and her truthful nature. Finnegan’s Wake is a complex, at times incomprehensible, text that many people hoping to portray themselves as intellectuals pretend to understand. Such pretense is anathema to Selin, and she unabashedly points out here the fact that it is a genuinely confusing book.

“The more I read about écriture féminine, the less appealing it sounded. It was characterized, I learned, by textual disruptions, puns, etymologies, and slippery metaphors like milk, orgasm, menstrual blood, and the ocean.”

In this passage, Selin recounts her initial experiences with a particular wave of literary criticism that is focused on the experiences of women. It speaks to the theme of Education Versus Learning in that it illustrates how useless Selin finds traditional, academic literary analysis.

“Now the Pilates instructor was talking about closing our ribcages. I often couldn’t tell if the things she said about ribs were literal or figurative.”

This reflection speaks to Selin’s characterization. She is literal in both the way that she approaches literature and the way that she approaches life. She is drawn to people, characters, and realistic language much more so than ideas, abstraction, and figurative language.

“Writers, Leonard said, were not normal people. As a writer, you were never totally present. You were always thinking of how you would put a thing into words.”

This passage speaks to Selin’s characterization. She is herself a budding writer and is working on how to transform her own life into an orderly, well-written narrative. Her mother, at one point, notes her frustration with the fact that any of their conversations and interactions might end up in her writing; for Selin, though, this transference is a matter of craft and process.

“I had thought that the aesthetic life would be more like a string of adventures than a coming-of-age novel, or the life cycle of a frog, where there was a grand procession ending with “maturity” and the ability to procreate.”

This passage speaks to the novel as a bildungsroman. Selin must constantly scaffold new information and adjust her self-analysis. Here, she realizes that the way she had previously understood the aesthetic life might not be entirely accurate, and she has to come to a new, better-informed conclusion. This effort is part of her intellectual growth process, and such moments happen multiple times during the course of the narrative.

“Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable.”

This passage also speaks to the novel as a bildungsroman. In addition to Selin’s intellectual and writerly growth, she also experiments with sex and alcohol. Although perhaps not a “typical” college student, she does nonetheless explore college life during this narrative, and her story speaks to the tradition of the campus novel. Her exploration of her own identity in the context of campus life is relevant to theme of Identity, College, and the “Immigrant” Experience.

“Did you ever read in Russian formalism about ‘The Knight’s Move?’ The theory is that change or innovation never goes in a straight line. That’s why it’s always surprising, and sometimes feels almost backwards.”

This passage is taken from one of Selin’s emails to Ivan. Capturing one of her more astute observations, this passage represents how she draws analytical inspiration from literature and from books. The idea of non-linear progress can certainly apply to her own growth trajectory, and she has happened on the idea through reading and not in conversation with any of her friends, her family members, or a therapist.

“How could you be so graceful in writing and clumsy in life?”

Ivan speaks these lines to Selin. He is not a particularly sympathetic character and does not seem to truly see Selin for who she is. However, in this moment, he does seem more reflective, and it is clear that although he did not treat Selin well, he did understand her to some small extent.

“How hard I had tried to like those trips to Ankara, to feel as though something interesting was happening, and not that I had been stricken somehow from the register of the living. It was something that I had never admitted and could only bring myself to think now that I was here without my mother.”

These lines speak to Selin’s discomfort with her Turkish American identity and, in a broader sense, to her search for her own, unique identity. Although it seems to many around her that she could write about what it is like to be the child of Turkish immigrants, Selin is much more interested in Russian culture. Ultimately, her identity development will revolve around embracing her own interests rather than embodying a particular ethno-national identity, a process that speaks to the theme of Identity, College, and the “Immigrant” Experience.

“But clearly bars where just where I did have to do research, not just for Let’s Go, but so I would understand the human condition. The longer I lived, the more it became evident that going out and getting drunk were the things people cared the most about.”

This passage shows Selin’s attempt to understand the “human condition.” An outsider who is uncomfortable in social situations, she has to acclimate to socializing. Understanding people by interacting with them, rather than by just reading about them, does not come to her naturally.

“Whenever anything made me feel badly, my standard procedure was to recount it to myself as a story in which everyone was at least a little bit right, and some people were kind or humorous, and their kindness and humor redeemed everything, and recognizing it redeemed me.”

This process will become a kind of rubric for Selin’s writing. She has the goal of creating realistic novels, and part of that realism is in creating multifaceted, complex characters. These kinds of sketches are a way of getting into the habit of the type of writing that Selin wants to create.

“In Anamur, Turkey’s principal area of banana production, a tall, intense-looking hostel worker offered to drive me to the ancient city of Anemurium. It was on a deserted beach. When we got there, he wanted to have sex.”

This passage speaks to Selin’s experimentation with socializing and sex. She wants to experience the kind of lives that she has read about in novels in order to produce better writing. Much of her experimentation is rooted in this goal.

“I couldn’t believe how relevant and applicable The Portrait of a Lady was to my life, way more so than Against Nature.”

This passage speaks to the theme of Literary Analysis and Self-Examination. This moment is one of the many instances in which Selin finds parallels to her own lives in literary texts. Once again, she blends literary analysis with self-examination, overlapping the two processes in her growth.

“Was that what a good novel was? A plane where you could finally juxtapose all the different people, mediating between them and weighing their views?”

This passage speaks to Selin’s characterization as a budding writer. It shows the way that she thinks about writing and, to a greater degree, about characterization. Her favorite books are character driven, and she wants to create that kind of writing.

“I loved Henry James again when he wrote about trying to dramatize Isabel’s life, even when there seemed to be no drama.”

This passage speaks to the way that Selin develops her ideas about writing and craft throughout the narrative. She is interested in characterization, and part of why she is drawn to Henry James in particular is his well-developed, complex characters.