Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine Literary Elements

Novel/Up Lit

Glasglow, Scotland in the present day.

Unreliable first-person point-of-view narration from the perspective of Eleanor Oliphant.

The tone is ironically upbeat as a reflection of Eleanor’s state of psychological denial.

Protagonist: Eleanor Oliphant. Antagonist: Mummy. (This is more complicated than it seems, however.)

Thought the conflict seems to be that between Eleanor and Mummy, it is really an internal one between Eleanor’s buried memories striving to reach her consciousness and her subconscious enforcing repression of those memories from doing so.

The climax arrives with a shocking revelation about the truth of the fire which occurred during Eleanor’s childhood.

Eleanor’s assertion that “It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination” foreshadows how she is a woman whose life is steeped in fantasy and illusion that she transforms into her own private reality.

Eleanor is a textbook example of the clinically diagnosed depressed personality whose suicidal despondency goes undetected by others as result of her persistent and successful ability to understate the true magnitude of her condition.

Literary allusions abound in the narrative: Eleanor and her sister share the same names as the sibling protagonists of Sense and Sensibility, Eleanor describes Johnnie Lomond as her Orpheus, and Eleanor compares her psychological state of mind to Jane Eyre’s.

Imagery underling Eleanor’s quite understandable resistance to fire is prevalent, often in very subtle and easily overlooked iterations: she has a distinct repulsion toward cigarettes, her first haircut to make her feel beautiful is notably one which covers the scars she received as a result of the tragic fire incident in her childhood, her very serious pronouncement of taking on the responsibility of caring for the cat which has been set on fire.

Mummy’s horrifically demeaning and dehumanizing treatment of Eleanor turns out to be a profound example of paradox.

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Metonymy: “It is incomprehensible to me now that I could ever have thought that anyone would love this ambulant bag of blood and bones.”

Polly the plant and Glen the cat are both complex examples of personification in which they are subconscious replacements for Eleanor’s dead sister in her attempt to prove she can save and take care of a living thing.