"Men don't feel bad the way you want them to," I told her. "They just get grouchy and depressed when they can't have what they want. That's why you got fired. You're depressing. Consider it a compliment, if you want."
It is hard to sympathise with the narrator. She is a textbook case of self-sabotage with an inability to care for others. For example, she notes that if her friend was "hanging by the neck behind the bath curtain, [she] might have just gone home". Her particular brand of disdain and mockery has served her well her entire life - let no one in and no one can hurt you. I think this is why the parents story works so well. When she finally feels something about the death of her parents, she doesn't know how to handle it and she starts to spiral.
The narrator is displaying definite signs of depression throughout the book. It is tempting to be drawn in with her vaguely narcissistic statements of being prettier than everyone, but she says it best herself: "beauty and meaning have nothing to do with one another". At her core, she seems to believe that her life is empty.
Admittedly, there is a good deal of repetition in this book, but that banality adds to the atmosphere. The literary tool helps to emphasise how empty the narrator's life is. I believe it is also a device to help the readers measure the growth in the narrator's life.
The prose is engaging up until the last fifth of the book. The last part reads like a first draft. I believe it is an attempt to convey that the narrator's internal circumstances have changed, but it just didn't work for me. It becomes clumsy and rushed. Unsure of itself. As a result, the end impact is diluted by confusion.
☼ analysis with spoilers from this point on ☼
I think it was quite telling that the drug dealer psychiatric kept forgetting that her parents were dead. Those conversations seem to be the only time that the narrator properly acknowledges that they're gone. It seems silly that the psychiatrist keeps forgetting such important information until you realise that the narrator herself is avoiding it. Her mum killed herself. Her dad died unloved in his own house. The world is demanding that she deals with these repressed feelings and showing the readers how obviously the narrator is missing the signs.
Chapter eight could be interpreted in a multitude of ways. The quote I'm referring to is this: "each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor... I am overcome by awe ... because she is beautiful ... she is wide awake".
The first interpretation is that of romanticisation. It would not surprise me Moshfegh was trying to imply that the narrator was more suicidal at the end. The woman has voluntarily jumped off the building to her death.
The second interpretation is that the narrator has finally decided that she wants to live. That she thinks the falling woman is awake because, as she is falling, she has most likely realised how much she wants to live. If we apply this to the narrator's life, then it seems to be a step away from her depression. Such an interpretation would be an optimistic conclusion, not strange for a contemporary book but at odds with Moshfegh's writing. I do not believe that this is supposed to be a happy story.
