58 pages • 1 hour read
Jodi PicoultVanishing Acts
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Setting
Vanishing Acts is a novel with multiple settings, each with an important role. The story starts in rural New Hampshire, where Delia and Andrew are comfortable. While things are not quite perfect, the characters are generally happy. Many of the characters’ past stories revolve around snow and winter sports and the rugged mountains surrounding the small town of Wexton. While Wexton is a comfort for Delia, it is a prison for Eric, who only stays there to be close to his fiancée and daughter. However, even Eric is relatively comfortable in this small-town life.
Andrew refers to Arizona as “a state unlike anything in the Northeast. A place where the soil was the color of blood, where snow was a fantasy” (65). In 2005, Phoenix had a population of almost 1.5 million people. Everything in Phoenix seemed designed to make Delia more uncomfortable. She walks off the plane into a wall of heat and a completely foreign landscape. While Delia and her father shared a house in Wexton, she must share a small trailer with Sophie and Eric in Phoenix. Even her search-and-rescuer career stalls in Phoenix when Greta is scared by a javelina and runs into a cactus. Delia hates Arizona whereas Eric decides to stay there.
The third setting is the Phoenix prison, where Andrew spends most of his time. Andrew states, “it never gets dark in jail, and it never gets quiet” (65). In prison, there is never any respite or peace. Andrew is constantly in danger of attack. The constant stress of prison renders Andrew almost unrecognizable. Like many characters in Vanishing Acts, Andrew does what he can to gain control of his environment.
Flashback
Vanishing Acts is a disjointed narrative. The story jumps between different narrators and frequently jumps to past events. In many stories, flashbacks have a transition. Something in the present will remind the narrator of the past and cue the flashback, unlike in Vanishing Acts. Picoult does not transition to the many flashbacks. Instead, a row of asterisks delineates where flashbacks occur, and another set indicates the end of the flashback.
There are nine flashbacks in Part 1 of Vanishing Acts alone. They show up with such frequency, at least once per each narrator’s section, that they cannot be considered a break in the narrative but rather a critical part of it. The flashbacks in Vanishing Acts provide background and exposition and help explain the characters’ relationships. For example, Fitz remembers dating Delia first but breaking up for trivial reasons. Though he wanted to express his feelings toward her, Fitz feared that would cause him to lose Delia and Eric. In this way, Fitz explains his continued silence. Likewise, a flashback reveals Eric’s strained relationship with his mother during her alcohol addiction, serving to help Eric understand why Andrew kidnapped Delia.
The frequent use of flashbacks in Vanishing Acts results in little cohesion in the narrative. The reader constantly moves between past and present, with little reasoning or transition. This disjointed style mimics the characters’ emotions in Vanishing Acts. After Andrew’s arrest, no one feels steady. Things become chaotic and unpredictable—the frequent shift between past and present mimics that chaos.
Point of View
Picoult creates a bit of literary chaos through the constantly shifting points of view in Vanishing Acts. While all the characters narrate in first person, the narration alternates through Delia, Andrew, Fitz, Eric, and even Elise. There is not a pattern in this shifting narration. Typically, authors use shifting viewpoints to describe the same event from different perspectives. Alternatively, this method can help an author detail an event one narrator could not attend, which happens, to some extent, in Vanishing Acts. Mostly, however, there is no cohesion between the narrators. They often refer to events described by other narrators, but they do not share their version. When narrators share alternate versions of events, it never happens at the start of their narration. For example, when Delia visits Andrew, he talks only about the interaction once he is 12 pages into his section. Even then, this interaction presents as a memory rather than a flashback.
Picoult uses this shifting point of view to keep the reader off balance. The lack of cohesion and the constant shift of narrators and events all mimic the characters’ emotions, who feel that their lives are chaotic and out of control.
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