We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Literary Elements

Fiction

The action take place in the US in the 1996s but some events take place in the past and are remembered by the main character Rosemary.

The narrator of the story is Rosemary and she narrates the events from a first person subjective point of view.

Neutral

The protagonist is presented as being Rosemary and the antagonists are her parents.

The major conflict is between Rosemary’s knowledge that the time she spent with Fern affected her in a negative way and the desire to have her sister back no matter the consequences.

The story reaches its climax when Fern’s identity is revealed.

The mentioning of the foundation of the Animal Defense League in 1979 foreshadows the Fern’s true identity.

When Rosemary claims that Fern is her sister, proves to be an understatement as it is proven later that Fern was a chimpanzee brought into the house by Rosemary’s parents.

One thing that is alluded in the novel is the idea that psychology is not really a science, but rather a subject that is like philosophy. This had the purpose of showing just how little people relied on phycology and how quickly they disregarded its importance.

In the first part of the novel, when Rosemary talks about her brother, he portrays him as a loving and protecting person in her life. To further accentuate this image, Rosemary mentions a time when a boy threw a snowball with a rock inside it at her and her brother protected her. But despite all this, Rosemary also reveals that he had a darker side to him and that he could be at times cruel.

Rosemary is the sole narrator of the story so naturally the reader would be inclined to believe that she is trustworthy and that what she says is the truth. Paradoxically however, Rosemary herself is the one who admits that her memories are not a reliable source since every memory of the past is in some way affected by the present and thus there is always the possibility that a memory was ‘’modified’’ involuntarily by the recipient.

A parallel is drawn between a normal stage in everyone’s life named the pre-operational phrase and the ignorance of the human kind until quite recently when it came to animals and how to treat them. Just like a child is unable to rationalize properly until a certain age, the human kind and the modern society chose to remain ignorant with regards to the way animals were treated in certain situations.

When the narrator mentions Fern, the narrator usually makes reference to other chimps that were raised as humans.

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