Fattened-Up Claim

While it’s not uncommon to miss details of a story the first time through, it’s unlikely this was the reason I skimmed over the ones I did. Considering that Bender makes sure Lisa is only supplying us with limited information about herself, it would seem to indicate that we would pay closer attention to the details she does give us. So instead, I believe it is Lisa’s unusual narrating style that caused points about her to go over my head. Bender repeatedly flirts with the fairytale genre over the course of the story. As a reader who hadn’t read much slip-stream before, trying to read it as a fairytale made it easier for me to process. But Lisa disrupted my task – she simply is not a fairytale narrator, who would typically be a sort of invisible third party that gives the facts and nothing but the facts, guiding us towards the moral. No, she is too complex a human to be invisible, and her narrating style is not factual but a choppy narration full of questionable information. In Lisa, Bender cleverly blends the fairytale protagonist with the narrator. I had to make her one or the other, so I broke her down by emitting details, and in the process managed to 2-dimensionalize her.