Genre
Literary fiction
Setting and Context
Upper East Side of New York City between 2000 and 2001.
Narrator and Point of View
An unnamed, third-person narrator.
Tone and Mood
The tone is anhedonic; the mood is dramatic.
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is the unnamed narrator. There isn't a direct antagonist, though social norms seem to be the main thing that antagonizes that narrator.
Major Conflict
The major conflict of the novel occurs in the narrator's inability to understand or feel her feelings.
Climax
The climax of the story is reached when she begins to increase the frequency of her use of prescription medicine to try to sleep for the course of a whole year.
Foreshadowing
The narrator's year-long sleep is foreshadowed by her love of sleep (her only way of connecting with her mother) as a child.
Understatement
The importance of mental health is understated throughout the novel.
Allusions
The story contains multiple literary allusions. The narrator's psychiatrist mentions Edith Wharton's novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Both books follow the struggles of young women with social norms in New York, albeit in a very different time period.
Imagery
Vivid dreams, terrible art, visceral and tangible descriptions of sleep.
Paradox
The narrator wishes to transform and heal herself but takes a path that others see as self-destructive and illegible.
Parallelism
“I deleted Reva’s messages without listening to them. I watched Air Force One twelve times on mute. I tried to put everything out of my mind. Valium helped. Ativan helped.”
The repeated grammatical structure utilizes the literary strategy of parallelism.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
N/A
