“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”
In this scene, Sylvia is describing to Enid what it felt like when she finally pulled herself out of her gun-drawing slump after her daughter’s murder. This sense of epiphany that Sylvia describes is reflected by other characters at other points in the book, when they suddenly have a different viewpoint of their life. These epiphanies are what really drive the true, lifestyle changes that the characters make, and therefore drive the action in the book.
And so in the house of the Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be lived underground.
This quote, though specifically talking about Enid moving Alfred’s beloved chair from the living room to the basement and his life following it down there, speaks to a larger theme in the book. It foreshadows the secrecy and withdrawal of the characters throughout the rest of the story. It also taps into Enid's shame about all of her family's lives, and how she tries to hide the truth of it all from her friends.
The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.
This quote comes from a scene where Alfred is having a mental breakdown, thinking about the end of his life. His depression is shown through the bleakness of the quote, which not only berates humankind for destroying the earth, but also pities them for always having dreams of being more. The talk of being “infinite,” and the later quote of death being the “only plausible portal to the infinite” (464), foreshadows Alfred’s death.
She’d fashioned images all her life and she’d never appreciated their mystery. Now here it was. All this commerce in bits and bytes, these ones and zeros streaming through servers at some midwestern university. So much evident trafficking in so much evident nothing. A population glued to screens and magazines.
These lines are in reference to Sylvia Roth and her obsession with images after the murder of her daughter. It brings up two major themes in the novel: technology and consumerism. The advancing technology of the computer startles the 65-year-old Sylvia. She has spent her whole life drawing and creating pictures by hand, but now she is exposed to the new technology of pictures online. This ties into the broader theme of advancing technologies, and the new replacing the old as generations age. The last part of the quote, “a population glued to screens and magazines,” brings into play the imagery of consumerism scattered throughout the novel. As with Gary’s son being obsessed with new gadgets, the old Mrs. Roth now realizes that the country is all becoming obsessed with material objects.
Enid had, true enough, had fun at Dean and Trish’s party, and she’d wished that Denise had been there to see for herself how elegant it was. At the same time, she was afraid that Denise would not have found the party elegant at all, that Denise would have picked apart its specialness until there was nothing left but ordinariness. Her daughter’s taste was a dark spot in Enid’s vision, a hole in her experience through which her own pleasures were forever threatening to leak and dissipate.
This quote illustrates that taste is a central point of tension between different characters in the book. The quote successfully elevates taste to a high-stakes conflict in which each of the characters feels threatened by the other.
