Eli as an animal you can't trust?

For discussion of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Låt den rätte komma in
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metoo
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Re: Eli as an animal you can't trust?

Post by metoo » Tue Sep 13, 2016 4:39 am

gkmoberg1 wrote:What you say mirrors how Håkan describes Eli.
Perhaps. After all, Håkan is the only adult in the novel who has experienced Eli but for a few seconds. JAL used him to say things about Eli that Oskar would not be able to tell.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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sauvin
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Re: Eli as an animal you can't trust?

Post by sauvin » Tue Sep 13, 2016 8:16 am

metoo wrote:
gkmoberg1 wrote:What you say mirrors how Håkan describes Eli.
Perhaps. After all, Håkan is the only adult in the novel who has experienced Eli but for a few seconds. JAL used him to say things about Eli that Oskar would not be able to tell.
But only indirectly, I think. The conversation wherein Haakan tries to barter for favours is revealing as all [CENSORED], in all sorts of different ways. Eli's disenfranchisement comes to the fore in this conversation more than in any other part of the novel that I can remember. I wouldn't trust any observation made directly by Haakan because where it comes to young people, well, erm, um, his perspectives might take us into directions we'd really rather not go, and only in part because those directions probably lead away from what's true or what's real.

Touching on comments made earlier by metoo and dongregg:

You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy. So it's said, and it so often seems true. Eli is a country boy taken out of life as we know it just as he was beginning to get to knowing it. I believe everybody with a more or less normal head growing up in more or less normal circumstances will have already gotten a pretty firm sense of what's right and what's wrong from his parents and his peers, and it's this basic sense we carry with us to guide most of what we do or say for the remainder of our days. What often troubles me where Eli's "moral standing" is concerned is that I don't know one flipping thing about what rural Swedes from a quarter of a millennium ago considered "right" and/or "wrong". "Du mosta tillbacka", she says in the movie (more or less), and it's not at all clear she's speaking with the voice of long experience. Since it's highly doubtful the Swedish CSI showed up every time a body was found floating in the river face down, and batteries of police, lawyers and judges became involved before Eli last saw the sun, one presumes that justice tended resemble what was often found in the American West during its expansion: immediate, in your face, and often final. What merited justice in those days may not always have been what would be recognised as criminal (or even just mildly transgressive) in the cosmopolitan contemporary.

I agree that if physical maturescence is arrested under Eliform vampirism in all outward respects, it's likely all inward respects are similarly frozen. As dongregg observes, "no new neurons". A perfect stasis is impossible because learning would also be impossible, and Eli can learn. Without the continuing series of changes in brain chemistry and structure people usually experience between the ages of (oh, let's just say) six or seven and (um, could be) twenty-five, though, Eli's cognition might be influenced by a vast body of personal experience as heavily overshadowed by the values she'd acquired and adopted before having been subject to this stasis, but she's still stuck with having the wetware of a child. She'll tend to see things in simple ways, even when they aren't (and things are rarely as simple as they seem at first glance), and it's been commented in this board many times before that much of what she does is impuslive and unwise.
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jkwilliams
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Re: Eli as an animal you can't trust?

Post by jkwilliams » Tue Sep 13, 2016 8:44 am

I want this story to have a happy ending but I've always had a problem with the idea of these kind of vampires living together. Oskar and Eli may not want to hurt each other but I have to wonder what happens the next time hunger causes one of them to lose control. How is the infection going to react when it's confronted with another vampire? I'm afraid it'll see the other as a threat and attack it the same way an animal would defending its territory.

The vampires in this story seem doomed to be alone and maybe this is why.

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metoo
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Re: Eli as an animal you can't trust?

Post by metoo » Tue Sep 13, 2016 11:05 am

jkwilliams wrote:I want this story to have a happy ending but I've always had a problem with the idea of these kind of vampires living together. Oskar and Eli may not want to hurt each other but I have to wonder what happens the next time hunger causes one of them to lose control. How is the infection going to react when it's confronted with another vampire? I'm afraid it'll see the other as a threat and attack it the same way an animal would defending its territory.
I have contemplated this for a few years. Since this is fiction, I can design whatever means necessary for Oskar and Eli to remain safe in each other's company, but I still want a plausible solution.

My favourite one goes as this:

Oskar is newly turned and starving. He succumbs to the urges and attacks Eli. Being much stronger, Eli has no problems to keep Oskar at arms length and is not seriously hurt. However, witnessing this from "behind", Oskar (the human part of him) experiences a very powerful emotional response, sending waves of hormones and nervous reactions through his body. These are sensed by the infection and causes it to withdraw, having forever learnt that Eli is NOT food.

Something similar would have happened to Eli when Oskar cut his hand in the basement.

Voilà!
Last edited by metoo on Tue Sep 13, 2016 5:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: Eli as an animal you can't trust?

Post by dongregg » Tue Sep 13, 2016 2:41 pm

cmfireflies wrote:I always thought that Eli has centuries of experience as interpreted by a 12 year old mind. Meaning that she still thinks like a 12 year old, just one who has gone through a lot. She's not corrupt like the vampire lord or empty like the other woman with the "wonderful idea."

That's more like it. :)
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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