How to Talk to Girls at Parties

“While it would be a lie to say that we had no experience with girls—Vic seemed to have had many girlfriends, while I had kissed three of my sister’s friends—it would, I think, be perfectly true to say that we both chiefly spoke to, interacted with, and only truly understood, other boys.”

Enn feels like girls are like aliens—incomprehensible. This quote reveals his attitude, which will provide the context for, and foreshadows, how incomprehensible the girls at the party are. The quote also shows Enn’s envy of Vic’s experience with girls.

“You just have to talk to them.”

Vic declares that Enn simply needs to talk to girls as a means to physical intimacy. His advice suggests that understanding them is unnecessary.

“‘They’re just girls,’ said Vic. ‘They don’t come from another planet.’”

Vic’s statement before they arrive at the party is ironic because he’s speaking figuratively about girls being from another planet; meanwhile, the girls at the party are literally from other planets. The quote foreshadows that the girls are aliens.

“[W]hen you start out as kids you’re just boys and girls, going through time at the same speed, and you’re all five, or seven, or eleven, together. And then one day there’s a lurch and the girls just sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you, and they all know about everything, and they have periods and breasts and makeup and God-only-knew-what-else—for I certainly didn’t.”

This quote develops Enn’s character. Girls are unknowable and unreachable to him. This aspect of his character transforms through the course of the story, and by the end of the story, he understands girls and relationships in a new way.

“But knowledge is there, in the meat, […] and I am resolved to learn from it.”

This quote by the Unnamed Girl refers to her quest to understand humans, just as Enn tries to understand girls.

“Understand me, all the girls at that party, in the twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces but, more important than that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, or oddness or humanity it is that makes beauty something more than a shop window dummy.”

At this moment in the story, Enn has begun to see past the girls’ surface appearances and understand them as unique and whole beings. The tension between outward appearances and reality is a primary theme in the story.

“I was sure that they were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt.”

Enn’s envy of Vic’s sureness with girls shows up throughout the story, reflecting how insecure and out of his depth Enn feels with girls. Vic is comfortable having conversations, flirting, and being physical with girls, while Enn wishes he could feel the same level of confidence.

“You cannot hear a poem without it changing you.”

Triolet tells Enn in this quote that words build the structure of who we are and what we know. Language is not merely a means of communication; it forms the listener’s character and perception of reality.

“[W]here does contagion end and art begin?”

Triolet’s rhetorical question speaks to how words, and in particular poetry, create and limit what we know and how we think.

“I have forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will forget everything; yet, if I have any certainty of life beyond death, it is wrapped up not in psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot believe that I will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on Stella’s face as she watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death, I shall remember that.”

Enn narrates this passage from his adult point of view, clarifying that this moment from the past carries great importance. The moment is an anagnorisis: the point in a story when one character recognizes another’s identity. Enn understands who the girls are after seeing Stella as she is.

“You wouldn’t want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.”

Just like in quote number 12, this is the moment Enn sees Stella beyond her surface appearance. He compares her to a universe, suggesting she is much more than just a pretty girl as he’d originally seen her.

“You know…I think there’s a thing. When you’ve gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn’t be you anymore? You’d be the person who’d just done that? The places you just can’t go…I think that happened to me tonight.”

While Gaiman never reveals what Vic saw when he was with Stella, Vic’s inability to explain it shows he can’t comprehend it either. Vic had been cocksure throughout the story, but now he is uncertain and afraid.

“Vic was sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a little boy.”

This quote marks the completion of Vic’s character arc. He has transformed from the confident ladies’ man he appeared to be to a scared little boy.