“Everyone knows everyone’s business.” ~ Melanie
When novelists set to the task of writing, their immediate thoughts turn to who will inhabit their fictional worlds and what events will take place. Character and plot are the driving forces in narrative, but of equal importance is where and when the story will unfold. This space where the story occurs is at once the creation of the author’s mind and at the same time is evocative of the real world in which readers live. Readers are thus invited to visit these imaginary spaces and can navigate this unfamiliar territory because a novel’s setting echoes and takes up common features of the actual world, and by doing so offers readers a way to think about both the fictional and real world. This bifurcated stance provides readers with a way of seeing into the novel and a way of seeing back out into their own lives. In the novels selected for this study, readers are invited into these fictional worlds by the main characters through the tales they tell, who they are, and the time and place in which they live. Thus, the novels locate their main characters in social and cultural contexts, much in the same way the lived experiences of readers are situated in social and cultural contexts. The intersection of plot, character, and setting ground the “actual reader” not only in the experience of reading the book but also in the subject position she must inhabit as the author’s “implied reader” in order to take up and understand the novel’s various events as well as discourses in the text related to these contexts (Talbot p. 29). In order to more fully understand the novels under study, we must first look at the subject positions these authors have created for their readers to take up as they are grounded in the fictional worlds of each novel.
Main Character
The main characters of the novels used in this study are all first-person narrators, an authorial choice that will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, but which immediately creates in readers a sense of intimacy not only with the narrator but also in what she experiences and where she is in the world of the novel. For the sake of this study, these main characters fall within the bully/victim nexus as each has been or is involved with a situation of bullying and/or harassment.
In Before I Fall, Samantha Kingston, a white, upper middle class, high school student in the middle of her senior year, enjoys her status as part of a popular girl clique. Prior to the start of the novel, she has acted as a bully towards several students, but in particular participated in the harassment of Juliet, another girl at her school who is seen as an easy target by Samantha’s group of friends. When the novel begins, Sam, as she is also known in the novel, is not thinking about Juliet but another girl she bullied when she was in the fourth grade. This flashback to a childhood memory is provoked during the novel’s first scene, a car accident in which Sam will die. However, this novel takes on an element of the fantasy genre when Sam must repeat this last day of her life over and over in order for her to reflect on those she has hurt and how she might change what she has done in the past. Prior to the car accident, as readers discover as the novel progresses, she has not reflected much on her actions toward those peers she deems as less than. Her status in the “social worlds” of her school and her ability to be mean to others without consequences are givens for her (Finders, 1997). However, a sub-plot to the bullying story includes Samantha’s relationship with her boyfriend Rob, with whom she considers having sexual intercourse for the first time, as well as her growing romantic feelings for
another boy, Kent. These romantic dilemmas will become part of the larger narrative and will be addressed in Chapter 6.
Similarly, Regina Afton in Some Girls Are is a white, middle/upper middle class, high school senior. She belongs a group of friends whose nickname, “the Fearsome Fivesome”, hints both at their unity and their bullying and cruelty toward others at their school. But the animosity they direct toward others is later leveled at Regina when Donnie, the boyfriend of her best friend Annie and the leader of the Fivesome, sexually assaults her. Regina later confides in Kara, another member of their social circle, about what happened. However, Kara, who harbors jealousy and anger toward Regina for her own past misdeeds, betrays her secret and tells Anna. Rather than believe Regina when she explains she was assaulted, Anna coldshoulders Regina, forcing their group to do the same, and eventually they connive to have the rest of the student body ostracize Regina.
This model of bully turned victim is also recounted in the novel Tease. Sara Wharton, a junior in high school, faces serious legal issues following the suicide of Emma, a peer at her school. This fictional retelling of the Phoebe Prince case in Massachusetts begins after the suicide and uses flashbacks to tell what led to Emma’s death while in the present time of the novel Sara tries to make sense of what occurred as she denies and then begins to reflect on her responsibility in these events. Sara, a white, middle class young woman, confronts the judgment of the community both in the courtroom but also in the halls of her high school where she becomes persona non grata when her role in Emma’s death comes to light.
Once again, the tables are turned for a character at the top of the social strata of her high school in Just Listen. Annabel, white and upper middle class, works as a model
as well as attending her local high school during her senior year. She enjoyed the benefits of popularity as a member of a small circle of girls who rule the school’s social scene, a group led by her best friend Sophie. Her friendships and position are imperiled when Will, Sophie’s boyfriend, rapes Annabel. Although Sophie walks into the room where the assault is taking place, she refuses to believe Annabel, leading to her ostracism within their social circle and within the school community at large.
In 13 Reasons Why, Hannah Baker, a white middle class high school student, is one half of this novel’s two-voiced narrative. Her story and her actual voice come through cassette tapes she mails to unsuspecting people in her social circle at school before she commits suicide. Her death provides the catalyst for much of the novel’s dramatic tension: Why has she killed herself, and what role did those who received a cassette play? Answering those questions becomes possible in the narrative structure of the novel because Hannah shares narrator duties with Clay, a friend of hers from school. Clay and Hannah had also worked together at an after-school job, but their close
proximity at school and work still did not allow them to act on the romantic feelings they secretly harbored for one another. Clay’s receipt of the tapes puzzles him because he believes he has always been a good friend to Hannah, and he remained well aware of his hidden feelings for her. As Clay seeks these answers, Hannah’s story of bullying
behavior and exclusion raises questions about complicity and the consequences of cruelty. Jujube in the novel Sticks and Stones is a fifteen-year-old high school student. Her actual name is Trudy, and her nickname reflects that she has one blue and one green eye. She lives with her single mother, and they were recently joined in their home by another single mother and daughter. Jujube’s mother has taken in her friend and her child Sophie
in response to serious family issues including domestic violence and alcoholism. Sophie’s father, who had been beating her, was incarcerated and her mother had to seek treatment for a drinking problem. At a school dance, Jujube makes a decision to visit the car of Brent, the boy who had asked her to the dance. When Brent shares his version of their time in the car with other peers after the dance, Jujube is quickly labeled a slut and faces harassment and ostracism at her school.
The consequences of being alone with a boy in a car also face Deanna Lambert in
Story of A Girl. Though in this novel, Deanna has actually engaged in sexual intercourse
and faces the consequences when her father discovers them in flagrante delicto. Deanna, who in the present time of the novel is fifteen, was only thirteen years old when her dad finds them. She is also white, and her sophomore year in high school has just finished when the novel begins. Although being found in a car having sex by one’s father might seem to be a private and family matter, the entire school has been well aware of what happened then. Deanna continues to deal with his discovery three years prior, as it has affected her position at school as well as within her family. Deanna is bullied/harassed at school and ostracized by her father
Point of View/Focalization
Authors make purposeful decisions about the story they will tell and who will tell that story and by doing so provides readers with a sense of reality even in a fictional story because “reality comes to us in the shape of stories” (Talbot, 1995). One aspect of
authorial choice related to the choice of narrator is the way this decisions creates the relationship between text, narrative, and reader and by doing so allows readers to understand both the text and the discourses the text utilizes (Talbot, 1995). This
relationship becomes more intimate when an author uses first-person narration (FPN), or internal focalization, as is the case in all of the novels under study (Gennette, 1972). The world of the novel is seen through the eyes of the narrator providing readers with insights onto the plot, characters, and character development, but more important positions
readers to take up certain discourses and ideologies embedded within the social and cultural contexts of the novels since they reflect the contexts of the readers’ lives.
Authors act as “reproducers of discourse” already at work in the world and with which readers will be familiar and this authorial move is wise given the desire to have readers understand, like, and buy one’s novels (Gavey, 1997, p. 53). But this move also continues to circulate discourses because “literary texts provide important examples of various discourses in circulation at a given time in a given culture” (Gavey, 1997, p. 55). These discourses then reify the real world inside the fictive world and by doing so ask readers to employ these ideologies as part of their meaning making about the novel. At the same time, given the close relationship constructed with the reader as a result of internal focalization readers bond with the narrator because she speaks in and through the text as narrator but also friend (Talbot, 1995).
Readers thus experience the world through the events of the plot as the narrator experiences them and tries to make sense of them as well. Her experiences as well as her emotional responses, reflections, epiphanies, and development create a relationship with the reader not just as observers but also as confidantes. Through this approach to
narration, the protagonists share grounding information about plot, themes, and
characterization, so that readers can sense the protagonist as a well-rounded, or dynamic, character, but also think through and feel with the FPN as one might do with a friend.
Internal focalization becomes a “powerful means for manipulating readers into subject positions” (Talbot, 1995, p. 31) and will largely be successful when the author uses internal focalization because it “tends to push the reader into subject positions identical to those of the narrator” (Talbot, 1995, p. 30). In the case of these seven novels, the subject positions afforded readers include white, heterosexual, middle to upper middle class adolescent women who live in American suburbs. Each FPN faces bullying largely as a result of sex and sexuality, so they occupy the role of a victim, though in several of the novels the narrator who is now bullied has also been a bully, which complicates her likability for readers and thus the willingness of the reader to take up similar subject positions unless the reader, too, has acted as a bully (Talbot, 1995). At the same time, in each novel another subject position afforded to the narrator and thus readers is that of a young woman in love with another character she is surprised to have feelings for in a romantic sense. Each of these subject positions as well as the process by which readers are addressed by authors to take up these positions (Talbot, 1995; Ellsworth, 1997) and for what ends will be discussed later in this chapter.
Setting
These disparate novels take as their setting very similar geographic and social spaces: American suburbs. The suburbs as sites of alienation amidst economic promise have become a trope used often in films and novels, especially as such feelings relate to adolescents. Little wonder since the rise of the suburb in America in the years following World War II coincides with the solidification of the adolescent as a recognized
developmental age for young people as part of the life span (Lesko, 2012). Others have argued that the rise of the middle class that allowed for the development of the suburbs
was the same impetus for the phenomena of the adolescent. But in line with the trope of adolescence, as discussed earlier, whatever material comforts exist for those raised in the suburbs, feelings of ennui and disappointment afflict residents, increasingly adolescents through the late twentieth century (Currie, 2004). Such attitudes make their way into the novels in this study.
In Before I Fall, the story takes place in Ridgeview, a suburban town in
Connecticut, that the main character, Samantha, sees as having conformity as its purpose: “being like the people around you is the whole point” (Oliver, 2010, p. 11). She also tells readers her hometown is a place where “we’ve got malls and basement parties” (Oliver, 2010, p. 37), connecting her home with consumerism as well as the two stereotypical haunts of the American teen: the mall and a party. At the same time, she shares that the national media has described her high school as having the highest rate of teen suicides in the country, again connecting this novel’s setting with a plague of teen life in
contemporary America and also foreshadowing elements of the story (Oliver, 2010, p. 45).
For Annabel in Just Listen, her house more so than the town she lives in provides a symbolic connection between place and thematic elements of this novel. As she has often does in her other novels, author Sarah Dessen locates this story in the fictional town of Lakeview, North Carolina. In this book, Annabel and her family live in a development named the Arbors, a nickname that echoes the symbolic use of plants in the novel that parallel the growth and renewal that will take place for Annabel and her sister Whitney, who suffers from an eating disorder in one of the book’s subplots. But her house provides the strongest symbolic connection to the novel’s themes. Annabel lives in what
“everyone called… ‘the glass house’” (Dessen, 2008, p. 48), designed by her father who is an architect. This house, which looks so beautiful as cars drive by, allows passersby to see directly into the family’s living space, but as Annabel explains, even glass houses can hide secrets. While onlookers think the entire house is made of glass, that’s an illusion. Instead, “only the front” is glass, and the “rest was tucked away behind, out of sight. So while it seemed like you were seeing everything, you really weren’t. Just bits and pieces that looked like a whole” (Dessen, 2008, p. 48-49). This idea of what is known and what is below the surface symbolizes both her family dynamics and the secret she carries about her rape while going about her life as if nothing has happened.
The idea that others can see into one’s most personal moments appears in Some
Girls Are, which is set in a Hallowell, a suburban town, an “in-between town, stuck
between a city and another city” (Summers, 2009, p. 13) where “everyone here knows everyone else” (Summers, 2009, p. 13). While Regina and her friends attend Hallowell High, they are well aware that in every small town people are connected in myriad ways, but such intimacies do not protect Regina nor do they encourage others to come to her aid when she is attacked.
In 13 Reasons Why, place figures prominently both as a backdrop for the plot, but also as a driver of the novel’s action and narrative structure. Hannah and Clay live in Crestmont, a suburban town bordering on a city that includes one high school, a hospital, and a park. In addition to sending Clay a set of thirteen cassette tapes, Hannah includes a map of important places that will help him understand why she has committed suicide. As the novel unfolds, Clay visits each location that Hannah identified on her map as integral to realize what led to her death. He listens as she narrates through the earphones
of his Walkman how each place and what happened to her there left her no other option other than death.
While the majority of the novels in this study take place in fictional locations, Pacifica, California, the setting for Story of a Girl, is an actual town in Northern
California (Zarr, 2007, p. 26-27). This coastal town, which is a suburb of San Francisco, includes a Safeway grocery store and Terra Nova High School, which both figure in the novel. As with the fictional counterparts, Deanne describes Pacifica in the morose terms ascribed to angst-filled teens: boredom and nothing of worth in the town. But this novel also offers a critique of class, which will be discussed below, that is shared in part through the narrator’s perspective of her hometown, a viewpoint not seen in the other novels.
While Tease takes place in a suburban, middle/upper-middle class town in America and Sticks and Stones takes as its setting a small town in Canada, neither book uses setting in an explicit manner as the other novels do. In these two books, setting is, in fact, a backdrop, information for readers to locate themselves in the story but not used as devices for plot or character development, and thus setting in these books appears not to be used a commentary on place and its role in the lives of adolescents. However, even in