Word: cals
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...maze,” the young Calliope is told by her father. Drawing from the Greek heritage that the two of them share, Calliope Stephanides, the hermaphrodite narrator of Jeffrey Eugenides’ second novel “Middlesex” who will come to be known as Cal, follows the history of his family across two generations and one ocean in order to come to terms with the tragedy of his very existence. In tracing the thread of his own improbable lineage, Cal becomes a recursive hero; sorting, like Theseus, through a thread whose interminability confines him forever, like...
...girl—learns of her Y chromosome after a tractor accident brings her to a hospital. In a moment of radical loss of identity, she flees her home and moves to San Francisco. Struggling to escape the vestiges of femininity and grappling with loneliness and alienation, Calliope becomes Cal and sets to the reflective task of writing “Middlesex...
...disjunctions in time and distance serve to highlight the similarities of each generation and their plight. As Cal recounts fleeing his past and his family for San Francisco, he states “A ship didn’t carry me across the ocean; instead, a series of cars conveyed me across a continent. I was becoming a new person, too, just like Lefty and Desdemona, and I didn’t know what would happen to me in this new world to which I’d come.” Cal’s sexual transformation...
...uniquely omniscient first-person narrator, Cal recounts his family’s story, including scenes and thoughts that he could not possibly know, adding his own opinions, musings, and questions. Describing his father’s conception, Cal poses, “Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates. Wouldn’t I also sneak up on a girl pretending to be asleep?” Cal is able to wax lyrical about...
Throughout his tale, Cal recounts a century of American history—Ellis Island, the Great Depression, the River Rouge Ford plant, Vietnam, Detroit race riots, the desegregation of schools, Watergate, the Cold War, and the oil embargoes. In doing so, Eugenides questions what it means to be American—citizenship, attitude, and history. Despite being third generation American and despite her family having climbed the class ladder—at least achieving the financial aspect of the American Dream—Calliope feels out of place in her private preparatory all-girls school...