E+P 1

Eleanor & Park: Start to page 114

The exposition of the book recalls a bus ride between the two different perspectives of Eleanor and Park. There is already an air of suburban angst and discontent delivered, and you can clearly tell that they are both somewhat outcasted from the cool kids. On page eleven, Eleanor thoughts on the back of the bus in-crowd are laid out precociously in one sentence: “they were out to kill her in a past life.”

This theme of discontent builds the feeling early on that they have a “missing piece” to the puzzles of their social lives. In the beginning, the dread from Eleanor’s home life is apparent to the reader, but it trickles its way into her interactions with other characters, without her speaking of it for over fifty pages. It seems that the only person who tolerates her is their outlandish history teacher, and he plagues her with the ever so embarrassing task of reading for the whole class multiple times. However, this is still the first character Rowell poses as having any compassion towards Eleanor; even her own mother could barely save her prized possessions!

On Park’s end, fixing what he needs is much less ethical than Eleanor’s poverty, but could be just as complicated. He has lived in this town his whole life, and changing the perceptions that people may have of him in the higher ranks of the social totem pole could be a messy scenario. Although I never had to worry about this personally, it would be a work of miracles to make some of those suburban shallow-thinkers forget those awkward mishaps of grade school years past. Due to the alternating perspectives in the novel’s narrative, it seems destined, in an almost corny manner, that these two will be fixing those emotional shortcomings. Fortunately, Rowell seems to realize that and plays it off naturally, with each bus ride and conversation covering ground. Just slightly.