The Virgin Suicides

by

Jeffrey Eugenides

Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Obsession, Gossip, and Scandal Theme Icon
Coming of Age and Nostalgia Theme Icon
Suburban Life, Class, and Decline Theme Icon
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Virgin Suicides, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Theme Icon

The Virgin Suicides illustrates how difficult it can be to process and mourn a tragic loss when the circumstances surrounding that loss are shrouded in uncertainty. Of course, this is partially why the neighborhood boys become so obsessed with the Lisbon girls, wanting desperately to know why they decide to die by suicide. But it’s also the case for the Lisbon girls themselves, or at least the four sisters left to deal with the aftermath of their youngest sister Cecilia’s suicide. Not only do the sisters have to process Cecilia’s death, but they also have to navigate their parents’ grief while simultaneously dealing with intense scrutiny from the surrounding community. What’s interesting about The Virgin Suicides, though, is that the sisters’ emotional lives are at the center of the novel while remaining largely unknown—the entire novel, after all, is made up of the neighborhood boys’ collective attempt to understand the sisters’ emotional lives, but this attempt is only based on theories and conjectures. Of course, certain aspects of the sisters’ home life are obvious from the outside, as the family responds to Cecilia’s death by ceasing to care for their house and property, suggesting that the Lisbons’ grief has overcome their ability to keep up superficial appearances. And yet, the Lisbon girls themselves seem quite happy and almost care-free when Trip Fontaine and several other boys take them to the homecoming dance. In fact, multiple characters remark throughout the novel that it would have been impossible to anticipate that the remaining Lisbon sisters would follow in Cecilia’s footsteps. This, in turn, heightens the confounding nature of their eventual suicides, leaving everyone—including their own parents—in a perpetual state of uncertainty. And this uncertainty, the novel implies, is perhaps what makes it so difficult for the neighborhood boys to move on, as they can’t stop searching for some sense of closure—a sense of closure they’ll never find.

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Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty appears in each chapter of The Virgin Suicides. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty Quotes in The Virgin Suicides

Below you will find the important quotes in The Virgin Suicides related to the theme of Loss, Mourning, and Uncertainty.
Chapter 1 Quotes

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement form which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

Chucking her under her chin, he said, “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon (speaker)
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

Mr. Lisbon kept trying to lift her off, gently, but even in our ignorance we knew it was hopeless and that despite Cecilia’s open eyes and the way her mouth kept contracting like that of a fish on a stringer it was just nerves and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Mr. Lisbon
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

No one else on our street was aware of what had happened. The identical lawns down the block were empty. Someone was barbecuing somewhere. Behind Joe Larson’s house we could hear a birdie being batted back and forth, endlessly, by the two greatest badminton players in the world.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

[…] they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon (speaker)
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:

We waited to see what would happen with the leaves. For two weeks they had been falling, covering lawns, because in those days we still had trees. Now, in autumn, only a few leaves make swan dives from the tops of remaining elms, and most leaves drop four feet from saplings held up by stakes, runt replacements the city has planted to console us with the vision of what our street will look like in a hundred years. No one is sure what kind of trees these new trees are. The man from the Parks Department said only that they had been selected for their “hardiness against the Dutch elm beetle.”

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon (speaker)
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:

Meanwhile, a local television show focused on the subject of teenage suicide, inviting two girls and one boy to explain their reasons for attempting it. We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth. Their answers sounded rehearsed, relying on concepts of self-esteem and other words clumsy on their tongues.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon (speaker)
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux’s gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers’ feet and hands are doing.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon
Page Number: 141-142
Explanation and Analysis:

It was crazy to make love on the roof at any time, but to make love on the roof in winter suggested derangement, desperation, self-destructiveness far in excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees. Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:

As it circulated in the next few months, this theory convinced many people because it simplified things. Already Cecilia’s suicide had assumed in retrospect the stature of a long-prophesied event. Nobody thought it shocking anymore, and accepting it as First Cause removed any need for further explanation. […] Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Dr. Hornicker
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:

They maintained that a person who couldn’t run his own family had no business teaching their children, and the chorus of disapproval had grown steadily louder as the Lisbon house deteriorated. Mr. Lisbon’s behavior hadn’t helped, his eternal green suit, his avoidance of the faculty lunch room, his piercing tenor cutting through the male singing group like the keening of a bereaved old woman. He was dismissed. And returned to a house where, some nights, lights never went on, not even in the evening, nor did the front door open.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Mr. Lisbon
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:

We still had winter in those days, vast snowdrifts, days of canceled school. At home on snowy mornings, listening to school closings on the radio […], we still knew the vivifying feeling of staying warm inside a shelter like pioneers. Nowadays, because of shifting winds from the factories and the rising temperature of the earth, snow never comes in an onslaught anymore but by a slow accretion in the night, momentary suds. The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season. Back in the days of the Lisbon girls, snow fell every week and we shoveled our driveways into heaps higher than our cars.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker)
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:

Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a simple returned gaze. Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:

We climbed up to the tree house the way we always had, stepping in the knothole, then on the nailed board, then on two bent nails, before grasping the frayed rope and pulling ourselves through the trapdoor. We were so much bigger now we could barely squeeze through, and once we were inside, the plywood floor sagged under our weight. The oblong window we’d cut with a handsaw years ago still looked onto the front of the Lisbon house. Next to it were rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were the phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Cecilia Lisbon, Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon, Mary Lisbon, Therese Lisbon
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 196-197
Explanation and Analysis:

It took a minute to sink in. We gazed up at Bonnie, at her spindly legs in their white confirmation stockings, and the shame that has never gone away took over. The doctors we later consulted attributed our response to shock. But the mood felt more like guilt, like coming to attention at the last moment and too late, as though Bonnie were murmuring the secret not only of her death but of her life itself, of all the girls’ lives.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Lux Lisbon, Bonnie Lisbon
Page Number: 209-210
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Like us, they became custodians of the girls’ lives, and had they completed the job to our satisfaction, we might never have been forced to wander endlessly down the paths of hypothesis and memory. For less and less did the reporters ask why the girls had killed themselves. Instead, they talked about the girls’ hobbies and academic awards.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker)
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:

Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-siècle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn’t delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil’s night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents’ group donated a bench in the girls’ memory to our school.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Mr. Hedlie
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:

We stayed until daybreak. As we came out into the first alcoholic dawn of our lives (a bleachy fade-in, overused through the years now by the one-note director), our lips were swollen from kissing and our mouths throbbing with the taste of girls. Already we had been married and divorced, in a sense, […]. In the distance, at the Lisbon house, the EMS truck sat, flashing its lights. They hadn’t bothered to use the sirens.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker), Mary Lisbon
Page Number: 231
Explanation and Analysis:

More and more, people forgot about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls’ foresight in predicting decadence. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, the continuing decline of our auto industry.

[…]

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Related Characters: The Neighborhood Boys (speaker)
Related Symbols: Elm Trees and the Lisbon House
Page Number: 238-239
Explanation and Analysis: