28 pages 56 minutes read

Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015

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Important Quotes

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“There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.”


(Chapter 1, Page 2)

The narrator opens her story by distancing herself from the woman she was fifty years earlier. She gives her 24-year-old self a different name than the one she currently uses—Eileen. The narrator is intent on separating her current identity from her past self.

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“That car was the one thing in my life that gave me any hope. It was my only means of escape.”


(Chapter 1, Page 10)

Though Eileen’s car has a broken exhaust pipe, she does not fix it or look to buy a new one. She is attached to the car as it represents her way out of X-ville; she has long planned to run away to New York City and start her life over.

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“I didn’t know there were others like me in the world, those who didn’t ‘fit in,’ as people like to put it. Furthermore, as is typical for any isolated, intelligent young person, I thought I was the only one with any consciousness, any awareness of how odd it was to be alive, to be a creature on this strange planet Earth.”


(Chapter 2, Page 20)

Eileen hates living in X-ville. She considers herself to be fundamentally different than the people she interacts with on a daily basis. These lines also reflect Eileen’s self-obsession and egoism.

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