Virgin Suicides Analysis

The narrators never specifically mention it, but they live in an affluent suburb of Detroit, Grosse Point, where Jeffrey Eugenides himself grew up. The clue is at the very end of the novel, when th...

The narrative voice in Eugenides' novel is one of the most interesting things about it, at least for literary nerds like us. Sure, first person peripheral narrators are a dime a dozen in the novel,...

The Virgin Suicides is almost an anti-coming-of-age novel. While the narrators grow up around the events of the novel, which take place during their adolescence, the Lisbon sisters don't grow up; t...

The narrators of The Virgin Suicides have an attitude of obsessive fascination towards the subject of the Lisbon sisters' deaths. They're absolutely enamored of the girls, obsessed with learning ev...

The novel is written in part as a demonstration of evidence. The boys present all of the artifacts they have collected as "exhibits", as though they were in a court of law. For example, they presen...

The title of The Virgin Suicides is figurative; the girls aren't necessarily virgins, but the term can refer to their youth and innocence. Call us morbid, but it reminds Shmoop of virgins being sac...

The novel ends with a long, poetic sentence lamenting the impossibility of ever understanding the Lisbon girls: It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only...

Other than the mysterious narrator, an unidentified "we," the novel's pretty straightforward. You know what it's going to be about starting with the first sentence, and it stays obsessively focused...

Everyone DiesThe narrators tell us right off that all five of the Lisbon sisters kill themselves, so there are no surprises. The rest of the novel will revolve around explaining why they do it, or...

The heroines of the story are unfulfilled: their strict religious mom is always ragging on them and grounding them. When their youngest sister, Cecilia, escapes the controlling environment by kil...

The story opens with Cecilia's suicide and continues until all four of her surviving sisters are committed to their macabre mission of ending their own lives. What would make them do such a thing?...

Jeffrey Eugenides' babysitter once told him that she and her sisters all attempted suicide, and he took the idea and ran with it for his first novel. (Source) Even though he has fancy digs, Eugenid...

Sex is a vital part of the novel, as everyone is undergoing a sexual awakening. Cecilia responds to puberty by killing herself, while Lux seeks out sex with Trip, himself quite experienced in the w...

Handel's Messiah (3.207)Mozart's Requiem (3.207)Gilbert and Sullivan, "Alone Again, Naturally" (4.150)James Taylor, "You've Got a Friend" (4.150)Cat Stevens, Tea for the Tillerman, "Where Do the Ch...