In a message dated 1/20/2010 12:27:35 PM Central Standard Time, franassa@HOTMAIL.COM writes:
"... the part where Hazel does herself in loses me. Her reason for doing it--having scared off a blind date due to her extreme ugliness--seems more pathetic than tragic, teen ballad material..." Joe--Hazel's suicide seems more understandable to me than two nations fighting a war for years because of one woman, no matter how beautiful. Now that's pathetic. In VN's hierarchy of tragedy I think his oevre (how I hate that word, sounds like someone being punched in the stomach) demonstrates that the death of a child is the #1 tragedy for him. Many unbalanced young people commit suicide over far lesser events. (Take the rash of suicides that followed Werther.)
There is a factor known as "the straw that breaks the camel's back." This, if memory serves, was not just a blind date but Hazel's first date, after many years of being cast as "Mother Time" in school plays, of being the wallflower in the crannied wall, of looking on at her contemporaries having their romances, etc. Was her death a suicide or an accident? Shade is at first equivocal but then says that "he knew." And he's probably right. Well, as a father, sure he is. His guilt is touching. It was he, after all, that passed on his looks to HS, not Sybil. (Please, folks, don't "correct" me here with incest speculations.)
A homely man and a beautiful woman have a daughter. She turns out looking like the homely man, and this wrecks her life, especially in her childhood and adolescence when these things matter so much. Now who, as one of two parents, is going to feel responsible for this? Shade spends a lot of time, and lines, on his own homeliness, his own contribution to the gene pool, probably more than he does on Hazel's actual appearance, sad as it may have been. It's a sorry fate to look like the less attractive parent, especially if he is the male and you're the female. It happens. No one should really feel responsible, but someone always does. Who?
Hazel, poor Hazel, had endured a long history of rejections before the final blow. Really, sometimes I feel that the contributors to this list have lived charmed lives or have not lived any lives at all or, at least, are not willing to admit that others have. Well, in keeping with the general method, please recall that "Humbert" (repeated twice!) has a first syllable in common with "human." And note, for further notes, that the first syllable of "Kinbote" implies that he may have something in common with the rest of us humans, his kin.
RSG
All private editorial communications, without
exception, are
read by both co-editors.