Knowing Everything

In her 2008 novel, Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout portrays the world as full of suffering people who make little effort to understand those around them, a view I find extreme but accurate in representing basic human nature. Almost every character in the novel deals with a horrendous situation such as suicide, death, drugs, or depression. While I do not believe Strout’s novel accurately depicts the world, I find her focus on such distressed people effective in highlighting the need for more awareness of the pain in the world. Specifically, I consider Strout’s pathos and her theme of depression very effective, as they demonstrate the characters’ internal conflict. Despite her characters’ misery, Strout prevents them from taking action and committing suicide, Strout reveals the hope within them. Nina, a teenage girl, becomes anorexic so she can fulfill the sexist views on how women should look but she admits to Olive, “‘I don’t want to be like this’” (96). The author uses internal conflict to demonstrate how Nina desperately wants to fit in but realizes the dangers of her eating disorder. Strout’s use of internal conflict creates pathos to target people who allow others to suffer to instill feelings of guilt. Nina struggles with anorexia and drugs, yet when Olive, a woman she barely knows, tries to help her she attempts to turn her life around. Though Nina dies, her death highlights the need for more people to take an interest in helping others, regardless of personal feelings about them or their decisions. The townspeople’s need for gossip continually overcomes their human compassion, a tragedy that occurs every day in the real world. Every day, magazines and Internet articles highlight celebrities’ arrests, drug addictions, and eating disorders to become skinny, because people read those articles for amusement. Few people try to help Nina and give her support because most of them see her as another source of entertainment rather than a girl struggling to survive. When one man, Kevin, returns home after several years and finds that people know specific details about his life, he questions, “does everybody know everything?” (35). Everyone in the town whispers about scandals, embarrassments, and trivial details and think they know the subjects of their gossip but few people actually make an effort to look beyond the surface and understand people’s troubles. As Olive explains, “nobody knows everything- they shouldn’t think they do” (74). In today’s society, people often judge others quickly and move on with their lives, rarely stopping to try to understand someone else’s life and how they can help.