Lessons

These chapters explore a key theme in the novel, The Intertwining of History with Personal Narratives. For Roland, many of his key life experiences are tied with pivotal events in history. Thinking about how he came to meet Alissa, Roland reflects on “the events and accidents, personal and global, miniscule and momentous that had formed and determined his existence” (157). These include World War II and his father’s posting to Aldershot, where he met his mother. They include the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had provoked existential fear in Roland, and his cycling to Miss Cornell’s. Finally, they involve his meeting Alissa at a Bob Dylan concert he attended because of the arrest, then release, of his friends by the Stasi.

All these events and their historical antecedents shaped Roland’s life and critically influenced the people he would meet and the person he would become. The novel raises a question: If history, and historical coincidence, is central to Roland’s and other characters’ lives, are they trapped by it? Are these characters able to learn from the past and exercise agency, or will they remain passive victims of historical processes and fate?

At least for Alissa, the answer to these questions seems clear. Alissa believes that her mother’s past and sense of missed opportunity dominated and determined her own upbringing. As Alissa says to Jane: “I grew up in the shadow, the chill of your disappointment. My whole childhood was lived around your sense of failure” (218). Jane missed out on becoming a writer, despite showing promise, and Alissa believes that Jane partly blamed Alissa and motherhood for this. Worse, Alissa believes that she had, because of this upbringing, started to imitate Jane in her adult life. Growing up bitter, “she too deceived herself in marriage” (219). Instead of pursuing her dream of writing directly, Alissa, like Jane, had married a man representing that dream.

Alissa saw Heinrich as the ideal of the resistance fighter and Roland as the “brilliant bohemian,” poet, and pianist. Both marriages, according to Alissa, are illusions, substituting for and stifling true artistic endeavor. Having a baby seals Alissa’s fate as becoming another version of her mother, someone destined to be mediocre and unfulfilled.

Alissa tries to reject this trajectory. As she says to her mother: “I’m also leaving you. I refuse to follow you” (219). Alissa believes that by leaving Roland and her son she is also enacting a break with her mother’s fate, as well as with fate generally. In committing to this choice Alissa feels that she is reclaiming a sense of agency and individuality against the expectations and flow of the conventional world. Whether she succeeds in this enterprise is another question. One could argue that by defining herself so clearly against her parents Alissa in fact remains trapped by their influence. In rebelling in this way, she might also simply be conforming to another cultural norm of her time. Namely, in rebelling she is following the culture of individualism and egotistic self-psychologizing that took sway in many parts of the post-war West.

Roland shares a similar fatalistic view of his own personal history. Like Alissa, he blames his parents—in his case, his father—for his problems later in life. As Roland says, “in our household there were no beliefs, no principles […] Because my father had none […] [R]egulations instead of morals” (193). Roland blames this alleged lack of moral guidance and standards for his inability to see that Cornell’s behavior was “despicable,” to resist her when he was young, and to come to terms with her actions as an adult. Cornell’s influence, and by extension his father’s, distorted his life well after he had stopped seeing Cornell.

In his 20s, Roland drifted through relationships and jobs, unable to settle down or commit. In his view this was because of Cornell, enjoying sex and love too early and in too uninhibited a way. Roland believes he had not developed other sublimated passions or grasped sex as a rare, fought-for privilege rather than a right. Thus, always looking back to an ideal of easy and joyful sex, he remained perpetually dissatisfied with the effort and compromises of relationships in adult reality.

However, like Alissa, Roland tries to arrest the influence of the past. And like Alissa confronting her mother about her childhood, Roland confronts and discusses his father and Cornell with Alissa. By talking about his past with another person, and acknowledging how Cornell had “rewired” him to become obsessed with sex, he hopes to exorcise Cornell’s influence over his future. This is symbolized by Roland conceiving a child with Alissa after their discussion about Cornell.

Roland diverts from the path he was on, committing to one person and to a definite way of life. In this way, Roland’s attempted escape from fate differs from Alissa’s. His escape is not about breaking from other people but about establishing new bonds with them. These two attempts to reclaim agency conflict with one another. Alissa’s desire to break free from familial bonds and Roland’s desire to establish them cannot coexist. For Roland, the desire to lay Cornell’s ghost to rest in the end leads, in the form of Alissa, to the creation of another ghost haunting his present.