54 pages • 1 hour read
Elif BatumanEither/Or
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Selin
Selin is the novel’s protagonist and narrator. She is in her sophomore year at Harvard College, studying literature, and wants to become a writer. Selin is an American student born to divorced Turkish émigré parents, although she has much more interest in Russian than Turkish culture. She grew up in New Jersey and traveled each summer to stay with her grandmother in Ankara, Turkey, where she always felt jet-lagged and slightly out of place. As the novel begins, Selin is just returning to campus after a summer abroad: She volunteered as an English language instructor in a small village in rural Hungary, a position she obtained through a friend of a former classmate and love interest named Ivan. Her relationship with Ivan had been confusingly undefined, and toward the end of the summer, he cut off communication. Selin, who still has feelings for Ivan, is crushed. On returning to Harvard, she moves into overflow housing with a group of classmates and resumes her friendship with Svetlana, a Serbian-born student whom she had met in Russian class during freshman year.
Selin is intellectually gifted, highly introspective, and deeply analytical. Although in some regards, she thrives in the high-intensity atmosphere of a top-tier institution like Harvard, her approach to literary analysis, her primary field of study, is markedly different from that of her professors and peers, reflecting the theme of Education Versus Learning. In her courses, she and the other students are encouraged to analyze literature through the framework of the abstract ideas represented in each narrative, the socio-historical background of each text, and questions of authorial intent. Selin is much more interested in what she terms the “human condition” and looks to works of literature not only for insights into their characters but also for parallels between the lives of those characters and her own experiences. This tendency, which reflects the theme of Literary Analysis and Self-Examination, is in part because she wants to become a writer herself. In that light, she sees fiction writing as an opportunity to order the chaotic, “fragmented” events of her own life into a coherent narrative that resembles the classic works of literature she loves so dearly. It is also a reflection of her interest in turning her own friends and family members into believable, complex characters; she is always looking to literature to help her explain her life and the lives of those around her.
Although Selin has both close friendships and acquaintanceships, she is an introvert who at times experiences social anxiety and social awkwardness. At multiple different points in the narrative, she notes her desire to leave a particular social function. Specifically, she is prone to abruptly leaving groups and classes for the safe seclusion of the library, where she feels much more comfortable. Her discomfort in social situations is part of why her relationship with Ivan played out only in the realm of email for so long: She was unable to approach him in person until they’d established an unorthodox communication that included few personal details and no small talk but instead cryptic moments of engagement with stories, ideas, and concepts from their Russian course. She is still more comfortable communicating via email in her second year at Harvard, and when she accidentally ends up messaging with Ivan’s ex-girlfriend Zita, she is initially hesitant to agree when Zita suggests they speak on the phone. Ivan had suggested alcohol as a way for Selin to loosen up and feel more comfortable having conversations, and as Selin begins to experiment with alcohol, she does come to understand why it is seen as a social lubricant. It is in part because of alcohol that she loses enough inhibition to begin sexually experimenting, and although she does not (typically) drink to excess, her early trysts happen after she has had a drink or two.
A common thread that emerges from much of Selin’s characterization is the idea of coming of age, in line with theme of Identity, College, and the “Immigrant” Experience. Either/Or is a bildungsroman, a novel that traces identity development through a protagonist’s formative years. Although much of Selin’s developmental trajectory within both this text’s prequel and Either/Or is intellectual, she also grows in that she comes to view her studies as part of a career path—one that begins with selecting literature as a major and will hopefully end with Selin becoming a writer. So, too, does she grow socially: In addition to her close friend Svetlana, she develops friendships with a host of other students and begins to explore the social world of college parties and nightlife. A virgin at the start of the novel, she experiments with a variety of men both at Harvard and in Turkey, a set of experiences that suggests a “healthy” transition away from her fixation with the unavailable Ivan.
Ivan
Ivan is a Hungarian-born student whom Selin met in Russian class during the previous year. He has since graduated and is pursuing an advanced degree in mathematics in California. He and Selin spent her freshman year in a kind of pseudo-relationship that Selin had difficulty understanding, and it was through his encouragement and connections that she obtained a volunteer position teaching English language in Hungary. The two spent time together in Budapest during the summer but have agreed to stop speaking by the time Selin returns to campus.
Although Ivan’s role in The Idiot is much more central because the main storyline in that novel is his relationship with Selin, his presence does still loom large within the narrative of Either/Or: It is their breakup and the information she learns about him that become the catalyst for the depression she experiences in her sophomore year. A large part of Selin’s unhappiness during this novel is rooted in how she analyzes their relationship in retrospect. At the beginning of the story, Selin reads “The Seducer’s Diary,” a portion of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Although much of her interest in this book is in the dichotomy between living an aesthetic and an ethical life, she is struck by the parallels between the seducer’s character and Ivan. Although she spent the previous year trying without success to interpret his behavior, in retrospect, she cannot help but admit that he was likely toying with her. This impression is further cemented when she speaks with Zita, his ex-girlfriend, who tells her that Ivan had in fact spent the previous year living with his girlfriend Eunice; the entire time Selin was trying to figure out if they were dating, he was actually cohabiting with a long-term partner.
Although not particularly sympathetic, Ivan is not without substance, and he makes one of the novel’s most insightful observations about Selin. He tells her that she is “graceful in writing and clumsy in life” (264). This astute remark reflects the way that Selin herself understands both life and writing. She thinks that the task of the author is to, from the jumbled pieces of their own life, build believable fictional characters and fashion a coherent narrative. This is in part because Selin is “clumsy at life,” as Ivan points out. Her life is baffling to her, and she hopes to make sense of it through writing about it.
Svetlana
Svetlana is Selin’s closest friend at Harvard. The two met the previous year in their Russian class, where Selin also met Ivan. Svetlana is a Serbian student whose mother is an artist and whose father is a Jungian analyst. Like Selin, Svetlana is intellectually gifted, introspective, and ill at ease with her cultural identity.
Svetlana has a keen intellect, although it should be noted that she and Selin approach the world in markedly different ways. These analytical differences are most apparent in Svetlana’s characterization of herself as an individual devoted to the “ethical life” and Selin’s as someone interested in exploring the “aesthetic life.” Although Svetlana accepts Selin’s differences, she does caution her friend about the possible perils of the aesthetic life, and she does not shy away from giving her unfiltered opinion about Selin’s choices and experiences; she is critical of Ivan in particular. Svetlana has an amazing capacity not only for analysis but also for the kind of memorization that language learning requires. It is through the implementation of her mnemonic device that the girls memorize a long passage of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin for their class.
Svetlana, in spite of her intellectualism, is a kind friend to Selin, and she suggests therapy to her because of Selin’s obvious inability to move past her relationship with Ivan. Svetlana herself is in therapy, and part of her psychological insight certainly derives from her father’s work with Jungian analysis. Nonetheless, Svetlana is also highly observant and in tune with her friend’s various vicissitudes and moods. She first suggests therapy to Selin when Selin frantically relays a piece of literary analysis that she thinks parallels her own experiences to her. This moment demonstrates Svetlana’s in-depth understanding of her friend: She realizes that Selin’s response to books is deeply rooted in her own experiences. Within the theme of Literary Analysis and Self-Examination, Svetlana highlights that Selin’s literary analysis is an important key to her underlying mental state, and thus she does not dismiss it or miss its greater psychological significance.
Svetlana and Selin also share a fraught relationship with their own cultural identities, with Svetlana also providing context to the theme of Identity, College, and the “Immigrant” Experience. Selin’s is rooted in a desire to escape the flattening characterization of a “Turkish American” and to produce writing that is characterized by something other than the experiences of an author from a particular ethno-national background. Svetlana’s sense of cultural dislocation is rooted in her experiences as a Serbian national during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Selin notes that her friend has “post-traumatic stress from the war” (48). But, to an even greater extent, Svetlana is struggling with her cultural identity as the result of the role that Serbia played in the Bosnian genocide. Part of Svetlana’s identity development in this novel is rooted in how uneasy it makes her to identify as a Serb.
Selin’s Classmates (Riley, Priya, Lakshmi, and Juho)
Although Selin does spend a considerable amount of time with a particular group of fellow students, several of whom are her roommates in overflow housing, the characterization of this set of figures is markedly less developed than that of Selin, Svetlana, and Ivan. They are not fully formed or multifaceted, but their role within the narrative is nonetheless important. They are mostly foreign students, a trait they share with Svetlana and Ivan and, to a degree, with Selin herself: Although American born, Selin does feel the multidirectional pull of her Turkish roots. They are all intellectual; their main role within the story is to participate in an exchange of ideas with Selin and with one another. Moreover, their very lack of characterization speaks, on a meta level, to the way that both the character of Selin and the author Elif Batuman conceptualize writing: Namely, these characters reflect the difficulty of transforming real people into multifaceted characters. In this text, it is only Selin herself and those closest to her who are fully formed.
Selin gravitates toward foreign-born students. Juho and Lakshmi both, in spite of their success in American educational systems, retain portions of their socio-cultural identities. Selin is flabbergasted that someone as “intellectual” as Lakshmi plans to have an arranged marriage; however, having grown up in a culture in which they are common, Lakshmi sees multiple advantages in a marriage that is rooted more in respect for family and institutions than in love. Lakshmi’s attitude certainly does not reflect an American or even Western norm, but Selin herself is not interested in norms, and part of her interest in an international friend group can be read as a desire to spend time with a range of people whose experiences might not match her own.
Part of why these characters do not seem to emerge as fully formed is that their position within the narrative is largely to further Selin’s story: They place her into social situations in which she experiences growth and discuss with her the ideas that she finds so illuminating in the various texts that she reads. It is at Lakshmi’s party that she first begins to experiment sexually and because of her discussions with various people in her social circle and roommate group that she comes to understand herself better as a person. The importance of this group of characters is not found in the way that they are shown to grow and develop, but rather in the way that they further Selin’s growth and development.
In a broader sense, the one-dimensional characterization of Selin’s classmates speaks to the project of writing as both the character Selin and the author Batuman understand it. Selin’s goal in her writing (and this is Batuman’s stated goal also) is to transform the confusing “fragments” of her life into an orderly narrative populated by multifaceted characters based on the people she knows. This novel represents an early stage of Selin’s development, and the lack of multidimensionality among so many of the characters can be read as emblematic of the beginning stages of learning to write: There are hits and misses, and not every aspect of each story will be perfectly developed and written.
