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.
Themes
Literary Analysis and Self-Examination
Literary analysis and self-examination is the novel’s most overt theme. These two processes are of great importance to author Elif Batuman, who views them as interwoven, a view she makes clear both in her other writing and in this novel in particular. In her other work, Batuman has emphasized her view that novels, by nature, are interested in a main character’s struggle to find meaning in their confusing reality that’s as cohesive as that in the character’s favorite literature: “[T]he novel form is ‘about’ the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a form as meaningful as his favorite books” (Batuman, Elif. The Possessed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, p. 94). The last lines of Either/Or comment on the sensation of this achievement: “Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes, so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books” (354).
It is in books that the character of Selin locates not only meaning but also the sense of order and coherence that her life seems to lack. She finds both other people and herself confusing; it is only through her analysis of the way that various fictional characters interact with and react to one another that she is able to understand real-life people. Books become a kind of behavioral and interpretational rubric for her, which is part of why she finds therapy so ineffective. It is not through conversation that Selin self-reflects but through reading.
The most long-standing source of self-reflection present in this narrative is Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Selin is astounded when she finds the text because she hadn’t realized that an entire book had been written on a question that she has long been wrestling with: how to live an “aesthetic life.” The book becomes an instant source of inspiration, offering many parallels to her own experiences. On finishing a portion of it, she considers the applicability of its guidance to both self-examination and the creation of literature: “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” (90).
The two focal points of literary analysis and self-examination remain important to Selin throughout the entirety of the story. She finds book after book that seems to mirror her own life, and a major theme emerges within her (very extensive) reading list: Many of these texts examine not only what could be termed the “aesthetic life” but also the impact of romantic relationships on their protagonists. At the beginning of the story, Selin is struggling to understand Ivan’s behavior. It is only after reading “The Seducer’s Diary” and watching The Usual Suspects that she realizes he might have been deceiving her. Such a betrayal—in Ivan’s case, failing to mention that he lived with his significant other—is incomprehensible to 18-year-old Selin. It is not until she reads about other such betrayals that she begins to understand the dark side of what she calls the “human condition.”
Selin also begins to apply the lessons for self-examination that she learns in books to the craft of writing. In her creative writing seminar, she is struck by how terrible the students’ writing is in comparison with the works of published fiction that they all read and analyze. She sets out to understand why this is. Part of the answer to that question lies in how writers represent not only their experiences but also the other characters in their stories. Selin wants to develop the ability to create characters and interpersonal interactions that seem truthful and believable. For example, one of her classmates writes a story about a sexual experience that Selin finds cringeworthy; as this scene happens while Selin herself has begun to experiment with sex, it is apparent that Selin is also considering how she might describe her own experiences in a way that she finds more readable. The novel notably ends with Selin embarking on her journey to Russia, the first of her travels that truly feels authentic to her. The implication is that she will be able to make sense of her own life and, as a result, produce writing someday that evidences this new, deeper level of understanding.
Identity, College, and the “Immigrant” Experience
Selin is a first-generation American, her parents having emigrated from Turkey. Her parents are both physicians, and their immigration story is not characterized by difficulty or poverty. Nonetheless, Selin does feel the pull of both Turkish and American culture, and in this regard, the novel can be situated within a tradition of immigration writing. However, much of Selin’s narrative problematizes the notion of a monolithic “immigrant’s story,” and the novel works to broaden the scope of immigration literature in the United States.
Selin is sensitive to how she is perceived by others because of her parents’ status as immigrants. She takes note of how many people, on finding out that she is Turkish, bring up the Armenian genocide immediately—even if they have only just met her. She suspects that American perspectives on the conflict between ethnic Turks and Armenians are rooted in stereotypes and a lack of basic knowledge of the two countries’ histories. She also recalls her first meeting with a child psychologist during her parents’ divorce. The woman asked Selin if women in Turkey had to cover their heads at all times and wondered how many camels were in the country. Clearly, she was confusing Turkey with Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia. Selin recalls how she, still only a child, felt compelled to educate the psychologist: “I explained how important secularism and science were in the Turkish national identity” (46).
Selin’s initial effort at pursuing her individual interests is also thwarted by her identity, in a sense, suggesting further the author’s frustration with how perceptions and expectations of immigrants tend to limit opportunities. Namely, when Selin applies to Let’s Go with the aim of traveling to and writing about Russia, she is forced to go to Turkey instead because her Turkish is so much better than her Russian. She initially stays at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara, the same place she has spent every summer so far. While she is there, she feels a deep sense of guilt and shame; what she mostly remembers about past summers is her jet lag and how out of place she felt in the household. She does not see herself through the framework of cultural identity. Although both her mother and her grandmother are Turkish, being “Turkish American” is not necessarily part of how she wants to be perceived. She clarifies her unease with the idea of immigrant cultural identity explicitly when she speaks about writing and her hope to eventually become a successful writer. She is adamantly opposed to becoming the kind of writer who identifies with a particular ethno-national identity; she does not want her writing placed within a particular ethno-national tradition. She finds that sort of literature flat and uninteresting.
A large part of Selin’s identity development thus becomes finding a set of identifications that go beyond Turkish American. This effort is where this novel deviates from many other texts with protagonists who represent first-generation immigrants, especially young adults like Selin. Rather than embarking on a journey of cultural rediscovery or figuring out a way to navigate between two cultures, Selin’s identity development focuses on forging her own way and shrugging off the mantle of first-generation immigrant entirely. In the novel’s final moment of inner monologue, Selin realizes that arriving in Russia marks the first trip she’s taken completely of her own volition, the first country visited that is not in some way connected to her friends or family. It is in this moment that she feels not only freedom but also a deeper connection to the person she wants to become.
Education Versus Learning
The difference between meaningful learning and formal education is another key theme within this narrative. Selin is intellectually gifted, hardworking, and passionate about literature, languages, and analysis. Nonetheless, she often finds her own interests to be at odds with the way that her professors and classmates approach their studies. This conflict is not uncommon within the subgenre of the campus novel, and it is a way in which this text places itself in dialogue with other narratives that examine the pitfalls of institutionalized learning.
The novel explores this theme in the context of literary analysis, with Selin often frustrated by the nonsensical nature of academic debates on campus. In one case, Selin attends a lecture on Virginia Woolf in which a disagreement devolves into a heated argument. The subject is whether or not Virginia Woolf had actually read Henri Bergson’s theories about time, which seem to inform her novels. After the event, Selin is “outraged” and disgusted by her peers’ focus on minor quibbles: “What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths?” (29). She herself wonders if Woolf’s text might not be rendered more compelling if Woolf had not read Bergson: Wouldn’t the fact that two separate writers came to the same conclusion lend even more credence to the theories? But, in a broader sense, it is the process represented by the argument rather than its content that bothers Selin: The utility that she finds in works of literature is in the truthfulness of the way that they represent their characters. She does not care about the socio-historical context of any particular text. Formal literary analysis, she feels, should be more deeply rooted in the texts themselves, in their depictions of interpersonal interactions and how they speak to the “human condition.”
Selin encounters a similar analytical disconnect in all of her courses. She is baffled by how her classmates respond to texts such as Chekhov’s “The Lady With the Little Dog” and Babel’s “My First Goose.” She is awestruck by the way that these authors build complex, multifaceted characters and cannot understand why no one around her shares her approach to literature. She does not “learn” from the discussions in her tutorial class (which she loathes), her chance in literature seminar, or even her creative writing course. Any meaningful learning, for her, is the result of her own responses to the books the classes assign. This disconnect is perhaps best instantiated by the symbolism of the library. Selin goes there alone to read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, which represents the extent to which learning is a solitary activity for Selin.
