“Impossible Narrative Voices”:Sofia Coppola's Adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides

Among the most distinctive features of Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), is its first-person-plural narrative voice. After the publication of his second novel, Middlesex (2002), Eugenides identified his fascination in both books with “impossible narrative voices.”¹ The voice in The Virgin Suicides is rendered “impossible” by the counterintuitive proposition of a collectivity, a group speaking as one. The “we” voice is composed of men determined after some twenty years to reconstruct the story of the five teenage Lisbon sisters' suicides. The men work from their own incomplete memories, contradictory eyewitness testimony they collect in interviews, and many material “exhibits” and relics they have assembled. The voice's plurality invites the reader into a seemingly normative position and, together with the “documentary” premise of the narrators' historical project, seems to promise reliability, relative objectivity, and social legitimacy. Instead, however, the narrators construct a text that undermines its own...