Jennifer Niven's All The Bright Places

Society has built a mold that we are taught to conform to as young children. We are taught to use our “inside voices”, obey our parents, and how to make friends so that we fit in with the others. Imagine living a life just to spite society, and to break the mold and the status quo. Imagine living a life just to think of ways to die. I have been reading Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places and I am on page 185 out of 388. The novel takes place in Bartlett, Indiana and features the perspectives of two different students who share a secret urge: to die. However, their reasonings are quite different. Violet Markey is an only child; however, this was not always the case. Her older sister and best friend, Eleanor was killed in a car accident. …show more content…
Violet and Finch are paired together for a geography project the same day that they met, and nearly died. Both students had been ready to jump off of the school’s bell tower, but Finch convinced Violet to return to safety. Finch feels a sense of responsibility towards Violet and her suicidal tendencies; however, Violet Markey is popular and insists that she was saving Finch and not the other way around. Finch takes advantage of their partnership as a chance to spend time with the mysterious Violet. Upon discovering a rather disappointing attraction for their project, Finch replies to Violet’s disappointment by saying, “believe it or not, it’s actually beautiful to some people” (Niven 97). The two discover that they may not be so different after all as they venture to find the “bright places” of the otherwise dull Indiana as a …show more content…
Throughout the novel, Finch is searching for reasons to stay alive. He has embarked on the search for the Great Manifesto of his life,“to die valiantly, with acclamation–in short, to remain a memory” (Niven 139). In order to achieve this, Finch leads a rather atypical life for a teenager. He chooses not to sleep, to come and go as he pleases, and to say whatever he may feel without fear of repercussions. Finch is also searching for himself, and he does this by constantly changing his appearance depending on the aura he wishes to give off. For example, there is a “cool Finch” who is known to be a ladies’ man, and there is “1980’s Finch” who listens to records and smokes cigarettes. He may appear as an outsider, but he is extremely self aware. His alert and mature conscience gives him a superior self esteem on good days when recognizes himself as “Awake”, but it also causes him to fall into a deep abyss of depressions that he calls the “Sleep”. Ultimately, Finch is just a boy trying to decipher his own person while simultaneously attempting to reconcile for all of the heartbreaks of the world by finding the bright

Show More

Related Documents: Jennifer Niven's All The Bright Places

Jennifer Niven