The personal fulfilment of the bourgeois isn’t worth the carbon footprint required to sustain it.
-- Narrator (Part I)

Importance: The as-yet-unidentified narrator introduces her central perspective on the characters in the novel, arguing that their very existence is harmful because their attempts to find individual success and fulfilment are damaging to the environment without providing any obvious benefit to humanity as a whole. The quotation underscores the narrator’s critical and condescending attitude towards members of this social class.

I KEEP DYING. I keep waking up. And every time I wake up, I see other people’s lives only in words. I see the language and nothing else. I die toward the end of the story, and after every death I’m awake again. I wake up telling the story of someone I hurt, but I have no voice; the story seeps out of me.
-- Narrator (Part I)

Importance: The narrator reveals the central narrative conceit of...