In the short story by Neil Gaiman, "How to Talk to Girls at Parties," the first-person narrator, Enn, retells the events that took place thirty years earlier at a party in London.
Enn's inexperience with girls at the age of fifteen is evident; he always ends up in the kitchen "listening to somebody's mum going on about politics or poetry or something" (para 6) while his friend, Vic, always gets the girl.
From the onset of the story, Gaiman foreshadows the strange turn of events that will take place that night. The neighborhood where the party takes place is located in a "grimy maze" of backstreets. Rusty cars and dirty shops sell "alien spices" and pornographic magazines (para 12). This is not the type of place young boys would usually go to a party to talk to girls.
Furthermore, Gaiman uses irony when Vic tells Enn that talking to girls is easy:"'They're just girls," said Vic. "They don't come from another planet'" (para 16). As we find out at the end of the story, these are not just girls, and, more than likely, they did come from another planet.
When Vic runs away from Stella, Gaiman purposely leaves Vic's sentence unfinished, "She wasn't a—"
So, what did upset Vic so much that he threw up and cried like a little boy? What corrupted his innocence? Perhaps as aliens, the girls also had other alien characteristics that were not of the typical female gender. Whatever Vic discovered about Stella while he was with her terrified him because she was not a normal female.
Therefore, ironically, perhaps Enn did not learn to talk to girls at parties that evening, but instead he held a conversation with beings most definitely not girls.
Throughout the story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties," there's a hint that the women at the party are not exactly women— or even human. This idea is foreshadowed early in the story and then the narrator, Enn, explains his run-in with these non-human "women" at the party. This is why we can guess as to what Vic means when he says, "She wasn't a—"
In the story, Enn explains his trouble talking to girls. He says that while Vic could get away with not actually talking to girls because he's good looking, Enn "did not know what to say to girls." The entire story is Enn trying to talk to girls. The first girl he speaks to is named "Wain Wain" and oddly says after a long speech, "Soon I must return to Wain, and tell her all I have seen. All my impressions of the place of yours." The next girl he speaks to calls herself a tourist and that on her last tour she "went to sun, and we swam in sunfire pools with the whales." Finally, the last girl Enn speaks to at the party is named Triolet and she calls herself a poem. She says about her people,
There are places that we are welcomed. . . and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and elimated. But where does contagion end and art begin?
After Triolet recites a poem in Enn's ear, Vic comes into the kitchen in a panic and says they need to leave. When they leave, Enn looks back and sees Stella, who is staring at them. Enn's description of Stella is interesting and explains these non-women:
Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eye—
You wouldn't want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.
All of these clues lead to only one conclusion: Stella, who Vic was with upstairs, was not human. This frightens him so much that he ends up "sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a little boy."
No comments:
Post a Comment