Text Explorations

1.      Page 34. In this part of the text, the narrator is talking to Ice Girl. After, the narrator discusses the consequences of Ice Girl’s leaving.

“I guess I never told you, she said, but I feel nothing. I just feel ice¹. I nodded. I wasn’t surprised². She turned a bit³. I’m off now, she said, bye⁴.”

1: I think this part of the quote is a great example of how the characters can be relatable if the reader is alienated in the story. Here, Ice Girl is saying that all she feels is ice. This might not seem too significant in the scope of the entire story if the story was more relatable by itself to the average reader. Sure, the reader might recognize that this is kind of sad, but it wouldn’t be too meaningful, I don’t think. However, if a reader is alienated, it starts to become more meaningful. When you can’t connect to anything in the story, you start to feel alone, and kind of worried and nervous; nothing makes any sense. I think the fact that Ice Girl says she feels ice is massively important to the theme in the book of being alone vs. having friendships or relationships. Ice has the connotation of being cold, and ice, rather than snow, implies more of a desolate place, with few other people. For a reader reading this book, that’s what most of the book feels like. It’s hard to understand. There are few connections and not much is sensible or meaningful, seemingly. But because that’s how the reader feels, the reader can more readily connect to characters like Ice Girl, who are themselves alienated in the story, but also show themes of the book.

2: Whereas #1 may have showed how the alienation of characters and reader show themes, I  think #2 starts more of how the reader becomes alienated in the story. The narrator, who we already know to be sort of crazy and strange, is saying that she somehow understood Ice Girl’s feelings. Now, this by itself isn’t altogether so impossible or strange, being that the narrator spent so much time with Ice Girl and Fire Girl throughout the text. However, it may be confusing for a reader because of the things Ice Girl reveals she is feeling. The Ice Girl says she feels “like ice”. The narrator, though, is not nearly in as bad of a place as Ice Girl mentally or socially. Since the narrator is a normal human, with what seems like at least fair relationships with classmates and others, whereas Ice Girl is more of an alien, being mutant and also very internal about her feelings and also not having many friends. So, where would the narrator base her assumptions off of? How would she understand in the slightest the feelings of Ice Girl when they come from such different places? Things like this are what come as confusing to the reader- things that don’t seem like they’re altogether useful or explained.

3: I think this isn’t hugely important, but it kind of shows Ice Girl in a way that demonstrates why she’s alienated in society in the story. She’s hugely dismissive and not very communicative, doesn’t have many friends, if any at all, and doesn’t show her feelings. This is one of the first times in the story where Ice Girl displays any feelings (she even says “I guess I never told you”), and right after that, she doesn’t get into deep conversation at all with the narrator. She just turns, and abruptly prepares to leave. These qualities make Ice Girl alienated in society not because of her deeds, which is more like Fire Girl, but because of herself. She isolates herself, and makes herself cut off, which is basically self-alienation. However, we must remember that as #1 discusses, this plays a vital role in channeling the themes through the characters’ isolation to the readers’ isolation/alienation.

4: This is another prime example of the confusion that often erupts in the plot. Ice Girl, who is a key character throughout literally the entire story up to this point, decides that she’s just going to go and leave the town. This is made more confusing by the beginning of the book where the narrator says “Our town was ringed by a circle of hills and because of this no one really came in and no one ever left”. As if leaving this town was already a strange thing, Ice Girl decides that she can just abruptly leave, without talking about it, and just like that, be gone for the rest of the story. This alienates readers further because they had previously been starting to connect to Ice Girl through her alienation, but her sudden exit leaves readers even more confused. A side note to this is the dismissiveness in Ice Girl. The narrator is likely, as far as we know, one of the people closest to Ice Girl, and the only thing Ice Girl says to the narrator is “I’m going now, bye.” This is adding on to #3, where we see a lot of Ice Girl’s qualities that show her to be so isolated and cold- another reason why she is probably “Ice” girl, she is the cold one, whereas Fire Girl is the one who is always taking action and heated and lively, even if perhaps in a negative way.

2.      

      Page 29. In this part of the text, the narrator was first describing Roy, who ended up befriending Fire Girl. Afterwards, the narrator discusses Roy’s relationship with Fire Girl.

“[Roy] was very rarely at school and he was a cutter¹. He cut things into his skin with a razor blade. I saw once; some Saturday when everyone was at a Picnic and I was bored, I wandered into the boys’ bathroom² and he was in there and he showed me how he carved letters into his skin³. He’d spelled out OUCH on his leg.⁴”

1: This start is already alienating the reader by introducing a new character who is, by his qualities alone, very hard to relate to. This immediately is confusing the reader, and alienating him/her because the reader is unlikely to have encountered someone like this, and even if they have, it’s still an unsettling character, one with clearly many problems. So, this is another fine example of how the reader can become alienated in the text, in this case, through the character and his characteristics. This confusion, though, does mean that if the reader does so wish, he/she might be able to connect to Roy more easily than if the text was more easily understood, because they are alike in the way that they are both isolated in the story (for Roy) or in the book itself (for the reader).

2: If #1 wasn’t unsettling enough, the reader will certainly be a little confused after this. The narrator calmly, like it was an everyday things, discusses how she got bored, and in order to stop the boredom, decided to wander into the boy’s bathroom. Not only is the action strange, but the pure calmness and tone of the narrator discussing this is not only confusing and alien for a reader expecting a short story with simple connections to the average person’s world, but it is also, in a sense, scary. If a reader was expecting something different, but was hit with a tale as strange as this in the midst of an already confusing book, the reader starts to doubt what he/she is reading, and her comprehension of the book. However, I think this is very much intentional- because as the reader meets more of these strange characters, making him/her feel more isolated, cold, and alone, those very same strange characters become more relatable for the reader as he/she starts to realize that these characters’ situations are similar in some ways to the readers’ situation when reading the book.

3: As a continuation of #1 and #2, this tale given by the narrator becomes more confusing. In a way, this is a combination of #1 and #2. A boy who is a cutter, who likely is an outcast in society with few social relationships, as he never comes to school, sees a random girl walk into the boy’s bathroom, and his first idea is to explain to her how he does these bad things to himself to the person who walked into the wrong bathroom. Again, as the book continuously shows, this is in no way normal! It’s very strange and confusing. This also shows another aspect that troubles the status quo of a simple short story/allegory that’s easy to understand. The Healer is not like that for the confused reader. And one reason why is a huge lack of continuity in the plot. There’s no flow or progression of ideas whatsoever. At the beginning, it seems like an allegory with “Fire Girl” and “Ice Girl”. But skip a page or two and you’ve got a cutter and a girl walking into the boy’s bathroom, and the cutter is telling the girl how he cuts himself. In the end, or near the part where Ice Girl leaves and you have many characters, including Roy and Ice Girl, having left or about to leave, Fire Girl is blamed for all the town’s problems, etc. If a reader came into this book expecting to draw easy comparisons or connections from this book to their world, they were likely very surprised at what they found, and this is a huge reason in why the reader gets alienated and confused so drastically in this text.

4: I think the fact that Roy spells out “OUCH” on his leg is significant, especially if a reader can connect to it later on in the story. Normally a reader might identify this as a product of Roy’s cutting, which is in part, of course, true, but I think it goes further. Ouch is basically an exclamation of some amount of pain, though I don’t think that massive amounts of pain being inflicted would have the person in pain say “ouch”, so I would say it’s reserved for less amounts of pain. It indicates sadness (you don’t want to be hurt, usually), and in Roy’s case, it sort of shows a deeper sadness and conflict- he seems to know that the cutting hurts, yet he willingly does it and tells others how to. So, to the reader who can connect to the text, if they see their alienation as a means of connection to deeper themes, I think this can, to them, connect to the ideas of friendship, solidarity, and suffering in a deeper way than to the reader who just sees Roy as another confusing part of an increasingly confusing text. Roy is, for the reader who can better connect to him, an agent of those themes, bringing them to the reader, which is, I think, Bender’s purpose in having such strange characters.

3.      

      Page 27. This is the very beginning of the story, so nothing has happened before it, but after, the story goes on to discuss how Ice Girl and Fire Girl’s relationship began to break apart.

“There were two mutant girls in the town¹: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice². Everyone else’s hands were normal³.”

1: The story starts off describing two of the main characters, and sort of the setting. We now understand that there are two mutant girls in a town. This seems like a pretty normal opening, and the reader wouldn’t be at all surprised by this. This seems like, and for a couple of paragraphs more will continue to seem like a normal short story. Indeed, the reader might make some early assumptions on themes or ideas- we have two girls at least that are being described as “mutant”, which would imply they aren’t only “different”, but in some way alien. So there might be, so it seems, themes of reacting/responding to being different.

2: This makes the story seem like it’s taking an allegorical turn- the “fire” and “ice” hands are what make the girls mutants, and of course humans have many associations with fire and ice- they are opposites, they cancel each other out/create something new (water or steam, etc.), and the characteristics of a person with a hand of fire would likely contrast the person with the hand of ice. So, the beginning of the story is definitely setting the reader up to believe that the story is an allegory of some sort, and the Ice Girl and Fire Girl seem to be some of the symbolism in the text. A reader would probably start looking for themes and connections within the plot as it continues, expecting this from an allegory. Obviously, we know that it is indeed far more complex than an allegory, so the assumption that the story is an allegory will in part lead to the alienation of the reader and his/her confusion with the text.

3: I think this part of this small passage is important as well to the hoax of the story being an allegory. It seems pretty cliché, because you have the outcasts, the “mutants” as they were called, in a society of normal people. This kind of allegorical theme in general is another way that Aimee Bender seems to be tricking the reader into thinking this is an allegory. But other than that trickery which has been noted several times, I think this idea that everyone else’s hands were normal is interesting. The narrator constantly refers to her “normal” hand, like on page 28, when she imagines that J., the “speechwriter”, and the only person to leave the town up to that point, would make speeches that referred to her as “Lisa with the two flesh hands.” It’s interesting that the author would refer to this so often, and it could be that this isn’t only the “allegorical” or “basic” theme of differences in society that a reader might immediately expect; but perhaps it looks deeper into other themes of the characteristics of differences and how they affect the nature of society, because Lisa, the narrator, seems like she almost wants to be different, as the society is, though the important characters, pretty much carbon copies of a normal human.