Themes In Susanna Kaysen's Girl Interrupted

Under the Water Why do humans have eyes? Is there a God, or have we organically made something up to justify the idea that we were made for a reason? Why should I care about my own life or anyone else’s? There is not really an answer for any of these questions other than “I don’t know.” These are wonderings that you would expect from someone who’s a little out of touch with reality, but then again, what is reality other than an idea someone thought up. These cloudy and restless ideas are of the same nonsensical but provocative nature as the thoughts that add character to Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted. There are many recurring themes in Susanna Kaysen’s reflection on her stay in Mclean hospital that help to animate not only
her own state of mind during the time, but also to highlight the immense differences in stigmas of mentally ill women back in the 60’s and now. These motifs help to illustrate to the average reader the complexities of mental illness and the difference between psychoticism and nonconformity.
Girl, Interrupted does not follow the typical story format and instead is told in an almost random succession of whimsical recountings.
For example, one chapter is called “Velocity Vs. Viscosity” and the one following immediately after is called “Dental Health.” They are completely unrelated in content, with the former chapter being about the “two varieties of insanity: slow and fast” while the next chapter is about a trip to the dentist. The disjointedness of the narrative, while seemingly just due to the unpredictable nature of Kaysen’s writing, is actually purposefully so. This is another sordid commentary on how time moved for her during her stay at Mclean. The improper movement of her storytelling is a reference to one of the main motifs of the story: time. Time is essentially the most important thing to Susanna during the story’s progression, the loss of it being the source of extreme stress for her more than once. The sporadic patterns of the chapters help to illustrate this by emphasizing the chaotic passage of time and the fact that by nature, time is not
linear.
The most memorable instance of time as a theme, though mentioned many times as a cause of worry for Susanna, is in the dentist’s office. “‘Where did it go?’ I asked him. He held up my tooth, huge, bloody, spiked, wrinkled. But I’d been asking about the time… he’d dropped me into the future” (Kaysen 108). Her loss of time here bothers her immensely as we see later in the chapter when she incessantly asks the doctor exactly how long she was under anesthesia. There are many moments that are similar to this where she keeps an intense watch of the time in order to make sure that none of it escapes from her. This need to control time is typical of people with character disorders, the need to have control of something even if it is a seemingly unimportant something. Her reaction to losing time, or losing control of time, is because her sovereignty as an adult had already been snatched by the hospital, she had nothing left that went her way according to her will. “The floor of the ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black and white checkerboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkerboard. If I looked at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. I always felt itchy in the ice cream parlor” (Kaysen 52). Her dislike for contrast also helps to show her disdain for losing control and change. These motifs of losing time, and thus losing control, help to highlight the debilitating effects of living with mental illness, and being controlled by that illness.
Another very noticeable motif is weakness becoming detachment.
Kaysen cites the importance of detachment to be suicidal. Daisy, another patient at Mclean had been sexually abused by her father and was schizophrenic. She is mentioned a few times, then seems to almost disappear from the plot until her briefly being mentioned, only as an afterthought. It is through this little afterthought mentioning of her that we find out that she has committed suicide. Susanna is certainly not upset, in fact, she’s almost annoyed and envious of her courage to actually commit suicide. The other example of this deep neuroticism is Polly. Polly was a patient at Mclean who doused herself with gasoline and lit a match. Her body was covered in burns and she was horribly disfigured, yet Susanna almost seemed to envy her. “Why did she do it? Nobody asked because what courage! Twenty Aspirin, a little slit along the wrist, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: we’ve all had those. Even putting a gun in your mouth though, you taste it, and suddenly the whole world lies between you and the moment you pull the trigger. The world defeats you, and you put the gun back in the drawer. The world didn’t defeat her before she lit that match” (Kaysen 17). This almost callous reflection on what it takes to commit suicide is very typical of Susanna throughout the book. She consistently recalls wishing that she had had the guts to stay in her room after taking 50 pills, rather than running into the street
crying for help which she did instead. The average person would be reviled at this sentiment, that it takes the utmost courage to commit suicide, rather than revere those who have really tried. Her respect for Polly helps to highlight her unstable state of mind and the detachment from emotion and sympathy that can come with mental illness.
The choice of words most common in Girl, Interrupted are scientific jargon, ponderous musings, a retroactive focus on the science and philosophical meaning behind her diagnosis and ones of other mental illnesses. All of these three types of speech are applied at almost random intervals. Officially, Susanna was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, a relatively common mental illness that is associated with consistent crisis in identity and relationships. Partially, her use of mix-matched patois is related back to detachment from emotion and the course objectivity that her particular illness is characterized by. For an example of this, we can look at the chapter called “Velocity and Viscosity,” which I mentioned earlier as one of the chapters that seemingly made no sense in the context of its placement in the book. “Out into the ether of the world to wait for the circumstances that would provoke its reappearance. Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture -- it’s the great mystery of mental illness” (Kaysen 78). These, the opening two lines of the chapter, are later elaborated on by her descriptions of the “speed” that insanity can go at. While it may seem as if her strange language is just so because she is “crazy,” the purpose is specifically to show what she talks about in the chapter. Her writing moves at different paces, ranging from over analytical and focused to uninterested and almost lazy. Her writing mirroring her state of mind either at the time of writing or the times mentioned in the story do exactly as she intended: help to educate the reader on the complexities of mental illness.
“An essential feature of this disorder is a pervasive pattern of instability of self-image, interpersonal relationships, and mood, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts” (Kaysen 147). This quote is from the beginning of the chapter that is simply called “Borderline Personality Disorder.” Only consisting of four pages of direct quotes from the DSM III, this is one of many chapters where Kaysen makes largely no commentary and instead either just inserts quotations, or objectively tells some story that she had nothing to say on. This chapter in particular could have been merely put in for educational purposes, but instead is clearly used as a segway into one of Kaysen’s most poignant commentaries: psychopathy versus nonconformity. To quote the National Institute of Mental Health, “{Borderline Personality Disorder} is a serious mental disorder marked by a pattern of ongoing instability in moods, behavior, self-image, and functioning.” Now another quote from NIMH from an article on the development of the teen brain, “The brain of an adolescent is very different from the adult brain. Emotional conflicts, difficulty forming relationships, emotional chaos, and changing attitudes are characteristic of the transition from childhood to adulthood.” These two descriptions sound very similar. This is a big point that Kaysen tried to make. She was only 19 when she was committed to Mclean institute for nearly two years and the experience made a large impact on her life. She constantly laments that rather than Mclean curing her illness, it caused the onset of it. Her commentary is on the fact that in the 60’s, and to this day, teenagers who are not mentally ill are diagnosed like adults would be. Furthermore, she believes that every teenager experiences some form of depression and chaotic emotion. She makes her point, that being abnormal does not make you mentally ill, through these emotionless and factual passages. Then again, these are also passive aggressive statements on the mental health system in America in general.
Repetition is a powerful literary tool. Repeating a story over and over in the news is one of the most effective ways to get people interested and convince the people that the story is important. Kaysen uses the repetition of certain themes to comment on her main points: the stigmas on the mentally ill, and the confusion of turbulent adolescence with mental illness. While she makes her point in multiple ways, her almost peaceful observations on her stay at Mclean and the people who were in there are what make this story interesting. “As a group we maintained a certain level of noisiness and misery” (Kaysen 47). The dispassionate delivery on her part, while at times funny and confusing, makes the point of her memoir much easier to acknowledge. Seldom do we associate impassioned and sober together but in this story those are certainly some applicable adjectives. So while this book does not answer whether God exists or not, or why humans have eyes, we have definitely learned a few things; being a teenager may suck, but at least it isn’t the 1960’s anymore.