Death

Over the course of the novel, the author uses both Eliza's and Finn's encounters with loss in order to explore the prevalence of death in life. In the context of Eliza's storyline, losing her sister years prior to the narrative present has inflected the way that she interacts with and processes her own experience. Indeed, although her sister is dead, she devotes the entirety of her journals to writing letters to her late sister. In doing so, Eliza is revealing the ways in which her sister's death has dictated the entirety of her reality thereafter. In the context of Finn's intersecting storyline, loss comes in the form of Max's cancer and Lily's suicide. While on his way to the hospice at the start of the novel, Finn cannot help but wonder why "these two conditions—liberty and death—[are] considered mutually exclusive" (17). He knows that for...