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.