How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair. Count the drunks in Russia or the suicides at Cornell. So many exam-takers threw themselves into the gorge of that hilly campus that the university declared a midwinter holiday to ease the tension (popularly known as "suicide day," the holiday popped up in a computer search we ran, along with "suicide ride" and "suicide-mobile"). (4.92)
The narrators are still searching for explanations; they've done some research and found out about an epidemic of suicides at Cornell in the 1970s, when a number of students jumped into a nearby gorge. Cornell didn't have any more suicides than other colleges; it's just that the deaths were very public. Those suicides were attributed to "the winter blues". However, the girls killed themselves in June, so what's up with this digression about Cornell? The boys are just reflecting that suicide isn't an uncommon cause of death for young adults. Even college students with plenty of freedoms commit suicides, they note. How much worse, then, for the Lisbon girls, shut up in their house.
Quote #8
After the suicide free-for-all, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon gave up the attempt to lead a normal life. Mrs. Lisbon stopped attending church, and when Father Moody went to the house to console her, no one answered the door. [. . .] During Mary's entire stay in the hospital, Mrs. Lisbon appeared only once. Herb Pitzenberger saw her come out onto the back porch with a stack of manuscript pages. Putting them into a pile, she lit them. We never learned what they were. (5.9)
While the girls are considered to be suffering from mental illness because of their suicides, we only catch a short glimpse of the toll their deaths take on their parents. It does seem that they lose their minds a little bit, isolating themselves and doing strange things. Mr. Lisbon's behavior at work deteriorates despite his best efforts to carry on.
Quote #9
They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; […] 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.
As the neighborhood declined, the neighbors began to see the girls not as crazy, but as almost clairvoyant, as if they'd foreseen the future and rationally opted out. This is a retrospective opinion, of course, and a pretty romanticized one. Can suicide ever be a rational choice?