The Healer Essay Draft

           Going into The Healer by Aimee Bender I had the same basic assumptions in the back of my mind that I’d have for any text, one of them being that as I read I would likely come across troubling details that would puzzle me, maybe surprise or disturb me, and demand analysis. Indeed, in almost every story I’ve ever read there’s been unsettling parts that caused me to pull back and think “wait…” When details like these stick out it’s for a good reason, often because the author is intending them to. They deepen our understanding of the text and sometimes guide us towards the author’s message.

            And yet while I was reading The Healer by Aimee Bender, the unsettling and troubling details of that sort didn’t hold up red flags till at least the second or third time I read it through. Odd details surrounding the character of Lisa went right over my head while reading. That’s not to say that I read The Healer the first time through getting nothing out of it. No, I picked up on other things, other details that were undoubtedly disturbing. But the ones directly connected to Lisa went under my radar. And they were big ones too, so big that when I finally noticed them I was shocked that I’d missed them. So if disturbing and troubling textual details stand out to a reader, but I skimmed over many troubling details revolving around the central character of Lisa, then why did I not pick up on these details while I was reading?

            While it’s not uncommon to miss certain parts 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 our narrator Lisa is only supplying us with only limited information about herself, it would seem to indicate that we would pay closer attention to the details she does give us. Another way to consider this is that it was Lisa’s unusual narrating style that caused details about her to go over my head. Over the course of the story, Aimee Bender repeatedly flirts with the fairytale genre. As a reader who hadn’t read much slip-stream before, trying to read The Healer as a fairytale made the whole thing 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, serving the chief purpose of ushering 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 in true fairytale form.

            So what exactly makes Lisa so problematic that I was not able to process her in full? To start, she is not a neutral, uninvolved narrator who is simply observes and retells the events of the story. While the majority of the story is devoted to the bizarre tale of fire girl and ice girl, Bender insists on having Lisa switch the focus to herself from time to time. An example of this is when Lisa is telling us about the unusual relationship between Roy and the fire girl when suddenly she says “It always smelled like barbecue where they were. This made me hungry, which made me uncomfortable” (Bender 29).

            By doing this, Lisa tries to turn the spotlight on her. It’s distracting and even a little bit irritating, which is likely why I ignored how troubling what she’s actually saying is. Moments like this in The Healer have the same effect as when you’re watching TV and someone behind you is talking to you. You might turn slightly so you can glimpse them out of the corner of your eye, but ultimately your eyes are still glued to the screen.

            When she does this, Lisa manages to take just the slightest bit of our focus away from the story. This is what a narrator never does. Quite the opposite, particularly in fairytales the narrators want to make the story as easily readable and understandable as can be. They want to make sure nothing can come between you and the message of the story.

            But that’s part of the problem with Lisa – she doesn’t seem the least bit interested in conveying a meaning or moral to us. When she throws in lines that give information completely irrelevant to the plot like “My own hands were shaking. I had to force myself to leave instead of going back and watching more” it seems she’s telling this for herself more than anyone else (Bender 29).

            Another issue with Lisa’s narration is that she doesn’t eagerly watch and record the events of the story from the sidelines – she deliberately tries to involve herself in them. Her trip to visit the ice girl in the hospital drastically affects the rest of the story (Bender 30). If Lisa hadn’t fetched the knife from her kitchen fire girl would still have her hand and all the subsequent mayhem wouldn’t have ensued (Bender 32). She has the ability to alter the events in such a powerful way that this alone would make her seem to be the protagonist of the story.

            Not only that, but she desperately craves recognition and respect from fire girl and ice girl. In an almost childish manner Lisa wants the two girls to remember her name, for example when the ice girl doesn’t remember who she is, it says “I was annoyed. I’m in your science class, I said, Lisa” (Bender 30). Not only does she appear to be telling the story to prove something to us – she also seems to want to prove something to them. In a way, she seems like a narrator who wants to be more than a narrator.

            An even bigger flaw (though I suspect it was intentional) in Bender’s choice of Lisa is a narrator is that she’s too human. That might sound strange. But think about it, in Cinderella who are we supposed to relate to? The monotonous narrator who starts us out with “Once upon a time” and gently nudges us the rest of the way? No, we’re supposed to relate to Cinderella, and to a certain extent the other characters as well.

            Yet then again, in characters like Cinderella there isn’t much to relate to. They’re these 2-dimensional characters that lack substance. But if Cinderella is 2-dimensional, the narrator of the tale is only 1. If Cinderella is barely there, the narrator is invisible.

            Going back to Lisa being too human, there are a few specific points in the text that make this true. Firstly, when she is describing J. and inventing scenarios where he’d make a speech about her, she tells us “Today we focus on Lisa, J.’s voice would sail out, Lisa with the two flesh hands. This is generally where I’d stop – I wasn’t sure what to add” (Bender 28). This demonstrates that she is only able to describe herself in comparison to others. We get no other physical characteristics about her. To Lisa, having only flesh hands while ice girl and fire girl have special hands is a part of her identity.

            But isn’t this something we all can relate to? We compare ourselves to other people constantly, considering that things they have and we don’t are a flaw on our part. This is how Lisa feels about the two mutant girls’ hands. While others might be scared of the mutants, particularly, fire girl, Lisa is fascinated by them. When fire girl cuts off her arm and then her entire arm blazes up, Lisa says “I still thought it was beautiful, but I was just an observer” (Bender 33). She sees herself as normal and plain in comparison to them. They are the special, important people who sit in the very front and the very back of the class while Lisa blends in in the middle (Bender 30).

            This is not the only thing about Lisa that we can in fact relate to. Another is how she fears being responsible for bad occurrences and immediately puts her guard up when discussing them. One instance of this is when Lisa is about to tell us about Roy and the fire girl, but first she says “I found them first and it was accidental, and I told no one, so it wasn’t my fault” (Bender 28). Although at this point we have no idea what she’s talking about, she sets us up with a disclaimer first.

            I for one can relate to this. I’ve certainly had times where I’ve been about to describe something that happened to someone and I say that it wasn’t my fault before I’ve actually told them anything. It’s this defense mechanism. We have this fear that if we give someone the chance to judge us they will, and they won’t like what they see. Lisa seems to care about this too. She’s tremendously insecure – she holds other people’s opinions above her own. It’s not a healthy habit. It’s probably one of the worst things we do to ourselves. But reading that Lisa does it too humanizes her for us.

            Interesting that these parts of Lisa that we can relate to are all negative things. And the parts we can’t relate to are even more negative. Beyond her defense mechanisms and her insecurity, she’s also extremely troubled. As an individual, I mean – she’s the sort of person you’d expect to see on the news or find in an insane asylum. The details about her that I didn’t notice while I was reading were mainly the ones that made her seem the most crazy.

            An example of this is how when she’s describing Roy to us, she’s giving us very cryptic and unsettling details about herself and her relationship to him, some of which being “Some Saturday when everyone was at a picnic, I wandered into the boys’ bathroom” and “He’d spelled OUCH on his leg” (Bender 29). The first one is completely bizarre – she just wanders into the boys’ bathroom. Not something that happens every day. It’s unlikely she really just wandered into the bathroom. There’s something else going on that she’s not telling us. That idea only intensifies in the second quote I listed. She knows what he cut into his leg, which means that he would’ve had to role up his pants for her to see. So there’s more to there relationship than she’s letting on.

            Continuing on the troubling aspect of Lisa thread, later in the story she brings up J. again but in much stranger context: “Now we stood together in the middle of a busy street, dodging whizzing cars, and I’d pull him tight to me and begin to learn his skin” (Bender 34). Not only does this imply that Lisa hallucinates or at least is very… imaginative – it also has the strange part about “learning his skin,” whatever that means. These parts alienate her to us – she is no longer the narrator we can relate to, not that she really should be in the first place. Suddenly she’s this troubled individual who is demanding attention more energetically than the actual plot. Again, she’s taking us out of the story, disobeying her call of duty as narrator and veering more into the protagonist realm.

            In addition to drawing attention away from the story itself, these troubling parts make us wary to trust her as a narrator. If she hallucinates, if she’s this screwed up, how can we completely believe anything she says? How can we be sure it’s not just all a trick of her imagination? And this is only one of the reasons she’s an unreliable narrator – she also only “thinks” and is “pretty sure” that the information she’s telling us is truthful. Narrators should be sure of the information they’re conveying. Why take away anything from Cinderella if you’re still unsure whether she actually went to the ball?

            It would seem at first that all of these things about Lisa would only make her one of the reasons The Healer could never pass as a fairytale. One of the principal other things that seems to interfere with the fairytale genre is how characters come into the story only to randomly and abruptly leave – Roy, J., and even ice girl are all like this. But when you think about it, don’t characters come and go in fairytales too? Sticking with the Cinderella analogy, when the fairy godmother leaves, we never see her again. And that doesn’t bother us while we’re reading the tale, we don’t stop and wonder why she left. That’s because we don’t have to wonder – we know, even if we’re not 100% conscious of knowing, that the fairy godmother served her purpose and now she’s gone.

            So characters disappearing is not in itself a problem. The true problem is that J., Roy, and ice girl serve no set purpose. You could say that Roy’s purpose is to get fire girl in prison. However, in fairytales these coming-and-going characters directly guide the story towards the moral. And The Healer doesn’t have a moral, or at least not the obvious fairytale-type one that you can’t miss. That all ties back to Lisa. So ultimately, anything else that makes The Healer not seem like a fairytale is merely a result of the story’s unrealistically complex narrator.

            Furthermore, while reading The Healer by Aimee Bender, I couldn’t help but miss some troubling and unsettling details about Lisa because she is too complicated and multilayered to process all at once. She is the one and only reason why The Healer is not a fairytale, not that characters come and go, not even that the plot itself is disturbing – after all, the original fairytales were pretty disturbing and yet they’re still considered fairytales. In Lisa, Bender creates a dissatisfied, troubled narrator desperately seeking to be someone’s protagonist. Maybe she hopes to be ours. Whatever the case, in creating this extremely 3D character Bender is doing more than banishing fairytale archetypes – she’s taking us on a journey with a character who is an over-exaggerated version of ourselves. Yes, there’s a lot about Lisa that we can’t relate to, but there is also a lot we can. She’s human and she’s unapologetically complicated. At first I detested her. Even now I can’t say I want to be like her, but still, there’s something refreshing about reading a character who you know (or hope!) that you’ll never be as messed up as. Fairytale characters are these unrealistic creations – the good you can never be as good as, the bad you can never be as bad as. Lisa may have more bad than good in her, but she’s not the villain of The Healer. She’s her own character in her own category. I think there’s something rather nice about that.