Sierra Lombardo-AB

Turtles All the Way Down

By John Green

Before this class started I would say I was an average reader and free writer, I had a bunch of free time that I would spend reading and writing, whether it was novels that I already have read or new novels I was trying to get myself into. As college started to approach I started to slack in my reading and did a lot more writing. I didn’t have time to get into new novels, I just had time for whatever my teacher assigned me. Now as my senior year approached I didn’t really know which class to take, I had a list of options but felt bewildered because this was my option and I didnt have anyone there to guide me to which one to take. I had to think of ‘what do I see myself interested in?” and “would I like this class?” based on the titles of the classes. As I approached How Writer’s Read I felt that this was a new opportunity to understand myself as a reader since I wanted to be a english teacher.

Going into this class I didn’t know what to expect, a lot of my other Writing Arts classes have either a lot of reading or a lot of writing but this was an even level of both. Before the class started we got to explore our early childhood life by listing all the books we read back then till now; which made me feel ashamed because I haven’t read many books recently and don’t really know what kind of books are popular nowadays. To go further into depth of feeling ashamed, is that when I came to college I didn’t have time to read, I was so busy with homework and readings that my teacher gave me that I didn’t have time to relax and read. I felt ashamed because as I came to this assignment I felt no guide into what I wanted, no one was there to tell me what to do or what book was good, I had to form my own opinion into what I wanted to read. The fun part was being able to explore all the books I read in the past and how much they have shaped me as a reader. I enjoy reading for fun, but nowadays I don’t have the time to do that because I’m constantly studying or working. 

When the class started we were put into groups of close similarity and we were to pick a book that no one in our group read prior. I didn’t even know where to begin because I didn’t want to pick a book that may seem boring or interesting to me but not to others. I had about 2 books I really wanted to adventure in, my first book was Speak. The reason I picked this book was because there was a feeling when reading the summary that made it seem so real. That the situations happening were situations that take place in today’s society. I brought this book up to my group but one of my group members has already read it so I had to go with my second option of being, Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, this book was very similar to my first book, but it’s based off of one of the major causes of death in America today, suicide. Suicide hits home for me as I lost someone to suicide and watched someone commit suicide last year. With this book I thought I would be able to open my mind to the feelings I should have felt or answer my unanswered questions. What really struck a turn was that almost everyone in my group had picked books based around mental health/ mental illness. 

Summary

Let me take you further into what my book is about. Turtles All the Way Down (henceforth Turtles) by John Green presents an example of the bildungsroman, a genre of fiction in which a young person matures and develops (or fails to mature and develop) into an adult. In this case that tells the young person is Aza, a 16 teen year old high schooler, who encounters all of the generic issues and confrontations a young person faces in high school, including romance, friendship, loss, with a bit of mystery and adventure, but she has a significant handicap: she has a disorder called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This disorder threatens her ability to function effectively in response to these issues, but in the end, through assistance from her friends and family, she ultimately faces these challenges, takes responsibility for the mess she has made of her life, and ultimately becomes in her own eyes, a human being.

Although these may seem like normal high school cliches, Aza’s life was far from normal. She not only suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) but also struggles to feel like an autonomous self/being, as she thinks she is a fictional character or an outcast in the world. As we read through this story we see a first person view, so we are inside Aza’s mind and have access to her inner thoughts. This brings us closer to who she is and at times helps us better understand how the OCD affects her. In the start of the book we see a little bit of her OCD, when she experiences what she called a “thought spiral” (Green 8). Aza has a best friend named Daisy, who is the complete opposite of her. Aza is someone who is hopelessly lost in her own thoughts, while Daisy is full of excitement for life and relationships, they compliment and irritate each other. Once we build more on the storyline, a mysterious disappearance of Russell Pickett happens. When Daisy and Aza find out that there is a reward, Daisy is exhilarated by the idea of solving a mystery and getting a reward, but Aza is feeling the complete opposite because she knows Pickett’s son, Davis. Daisy insists on visiting and meeting Davis and convinces Aza to go. We see an instant connection between Davis and Aza, they both lost their parents and now Davis might lose the other one. As their romance unfolds we can see it’s not a normal teen love story between them. Aza is completely controlled by her OCD and her compulsions, and as we see her suffer we learn what it’s like for someone to suffer with OCD. We grow to see that Green built this theme around Aza’s OCD and how extreme it gets, especially when it comes to her wanting to drink hand sanitizer because she is deathly afraid of contracting Clostridium difficile. I didn’t know what this disease was but as Aza becomes more and more afraid of contracting it I automatically imagine it being awful and severe. I felt when reading and writing my first blog that Green built this dark image of Aza and her constant battle with who she is and he doesn’t shy away from her loneliness. I think what really stood out to me was when Aza was talking about who she was 

“It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know?” (Green 203) 

She is constantly trying to portray her ongoing frustration, 

“It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it.”(Green 203)

Robert Mckee was an author who was very well known for his “”Structure and Meaning.” Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting,” which introduced us to Premise, Controlling Idea, and Counter Idea. To get to finding out what the premise was, I had to look back on the readings by Mckee, that defined premise as “the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story, an example would be What would happen if..?”(Mckee 112). After discussion with Angelina and messages from Paige about what the premise would be we finally came to a conclusion” “One must be independent and emotionally open in order to feel like a true individual.” It was hard to see that this was it because I was so blinded by her love life and her battle with OCD that I forgot about Aza not identifying or feeling like she is human. Throughout this entire story we are constantly in Aza’s head battling how she feels and who she is. But when I dug deeper into what I thought the premise could be there were other ideas that came to my mind, one being “how does someone suffering with impairment deal with normal things?” Since she suffers from OCD we see that it constantly is taking over her life and she can’t seem to get past it. 

Before we entered into the controlling idea, I had to go over my notes on Rober Mckee’s definition of controlling idea, it is “the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last act’s climax” (Mckee 112). The last act’s climax of Turtles is when Aza tries to gain her mothers trust back, this is when we see Aza 

Entering into the controlling idea, Being passive and defining one’s self by their mental illness leads to feeling indistinguishable. Aza wants to ignore the chaos in her life by pushing it off because she wants no part in her real life. All of this leads us to the counter idea, What happens if you have to acknowledge your identity?” In Robert Mckee’s reading, he mentions that the the controlling idea is 

“the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last acts climax, it shapes the thought” (Mckee 112)

Which made sense because Aza wanted to be invisible and having this illness put who she was behind a mask and made her seem invisible.

The value graph I included shows Aza’s struggle from identifying herself as a no one to someone. We see this right away in the beginning when she identifies herself as a fictional character. “Anybody can look at you.  It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see” (9).There was a constant battle between identity, love, and friendship with Aza and this graph gives better insight into the positive and negative. But in the end Aza makes a breakthrough with who she is referring to herself as a singular proper noun.

Genre and Form 

To get to the genre and form of the book I had to look back and review Paige’s blog on this, as I review she ties together how the controlling and counter ideas form the roles of genre. She also brings about the mystery that Green blinded us with when it came to Davis’s dad and his disappearance. Paige also mentioned bildungsroman, which is a narrative of development or maturation, transitioning from adolescence into adulthood. And we can really see this grow throughout the novel, as Aza, a 16 year old, wanting to be fictional and an outcast amongst the drama around her yet grows to accept and become a someone. She was identifying herself and her mental illness as 2 different people and making sure that the OCD was personified as a demon. 

I definitely think throughout this story I was blocked from what I wanted to see and what I didn’t want to see because their was so much going on: the disappearance, her OCD, getting help, the love story, her thoughts on committing suicide, and her friendship, it was almost as if Green wanted to block us from understanding the bigger picture and hid it all under mystery tropes. I do think Paige and I see the mystery behind Green differently, as Paige sees it as Aza’s fear of C.diff and contracting it so she becomes insane and thinks drinking hand sanitizer would protect her, were as I see it being Aza not wanting to recognize who she is and that she is a person rather than fictional. But this all leads to the same struggle which is Aza’s OCD. I do feel that Paige’s blog helped me understand the hermeneutic code and how it operates better. 

But there’s more than just the Hermeneutic Code that gets represented in this novel, something else I want to cover is in Angelina’s comment which talks about the semic code. The semic code can be defined by Silverman as “represents the major device for themortizing person, objects, or places”(Silverman 251). What the semic code in this matter represents is Aza’s OCD and that gets brought to my attention through Angelina’s comment. We have so many questions about her OCD and how controlling it gets, but later in the end we watch Aza grow from the semic code and understand herself as a proper noun, which is a form of her taking control. 

With talk about codes, I become aware of the codes that are around me, one being the Proairetic code, which is introduced to us by Silverman as  “plot related events that lead to certain actions or reactions from the characters and maybe even the reader. This code determines the causal (cause and effect), narrative sequence and syntagmatic progression.”() This is something we can see in Aza’s mental illness and OCD because as she suffers with OCD her mental illness is impacted and puts a strain on her life. This also affects who she is as a character, for example her obsession with staying germ free and drinking hand sanitizer to help her. Another example is her obsession with the cut on her finger. “Ever since I was little, I’ve pressed my right thumbnail into the finger pad of my middle finger, and so now there’s this weird callus over my fingerprint. After so many years of doing this, I can open up a crack in the skin really easily, so I cover it up with a Band-Aid to try to prevent infection” (Green, 6). With cause theirs and affect and these are the many instances where we can see the Proairetic code take place. 

Intertextual Codes

Throughout the novel I felt that gender played a major role in this, as we were able to see that gender differentiates between Davis and Aza. Davis has more of the power when it comes to certain situations. We see him get along with Aza but when it comes to small instances she becomes a bit more imposing and close minded. Davis has so much power because he holds the connections and has more money then Aza. I actually didn’t think this at all about Davis till I read about Brandon’s thoughts in his blog. I honestly read through the whole book being blinded to Davis’ power over situations. But when I read about this I almost thought maybe Davis shares something with Aza and her OCD. 

There is another instant where we see a disconnection between a character, Davis, this was brought to my attention in one of the comments that was made by my group leader, “‘…it was just so weird, to hear the newscasters say, ‘Russell Davis Pickett has been reported missing.’ Because I was right here’” (Green 31). Davis struggles to identify himself and feels overshadowed because he only is connected to who his father is. Since he only has a father and no mother in the picture he can feel identified as his father’s son instead of an actual individual, especially because his dad holds the power and money. We can see a connection between him and Aza since they both suffer to identify themselves, yet there are differences to it since Aza is controlled by her OCD. She calls herself fictional, a sidekick, authored by others, controlled by her OCD, her mother’s daughter. Aza puts herself in categories that are outside of herself and others, essentially identifying as an outcast. What’s interesting is that both characters feel invisible in their lives. Now as we stated above the controlling and counter ideas maybe this is something we need to think harder on. Since society today is so involved, wouldn’t we know if we are a romantically good person in a good relationship? Leading to the opposing controlling value that could be represented as, Giving yourself to others doesn’t leave room for you to find yourself. You won’t be able to find those individual unique aspects if you define yourself but others. Since both characters depend so much on what others think they are stuck not fulfilling their life and are only able to live through the eyes and beliefs of what others think.

Rhetoric of Narrative

As my group and I got to the end of the novel there might be some questions about what kind of reader are we? In “A Rhetoric of Reading by James Seitz, he helps us identify what a capable reader is, someone “who not only has the ability to ‘follow’ the text but also the ability to jump ahead of it” (146). I tend to be that type of reader in every book I read, I always want to assume what is happening next. But I also feel that it’s so easy to be that type of reader, because when you get so involved in what you are reading you just want to know the next without even getting there yet. There is a struggle with being a capable reader because guessing what is going to happen next can set a bad  tone for what you are about to read, and can make you get mad at characters. Another instance of a complete split in the novel is when her OCD takes over her body so much that she drinks hand sanitizer, when this happened I stopped in my tracks, put the book down and said “What the hell just happened!!??” I couldn’t believe she drank hand sanitizer, like that would free her body from germs, more like that would kill her!Everything that I read in that moment was completely gone and I was more concerned about her and her health. It was like those moments when you’re watching tv and you just wanna tell the actors not to do something but you aren’t present, that’s how I felt. 

Being a capable reader means “who not only has the ability to ‘follow’ the text but also the ability to jump ahead of it” (Seitz 146). I believe that I become a capable reader since I believe that Aza’s OCD is making her into a monster. But since I think that it makes her a monster doesnt that mean I am turning over into an inauthentic resistant reader. Because they would be the type of reader that believes Aza to be exaggerating her struggle with OCD. Since she does the most absurd things like drink sanitizer. “It is the capable reader (the authorial reader/narrative reader) that rejects any of these ideas. They understand the power of compulsions and irrational thoughts that come with this disorder.” (Blog 4) 

I started to get stuck on how to go on from here, but something that was brought to my attention was the fact that this novel was told in a first person perspective, what if Daisy or Davis was telling the story instead? There’s a bias around Aza’s life and what happens in it, since we can only see her thoughts and her emotions. This would be an example of an inauthentic reader because people might not believe that Aza is an accurate depiction of someone who struggles with OCD. A person with a specific mental illness like OCD can have completely different experience from another person who also has OCD. I think as a reader I was too much trapped in her head and in her mental illness that I didn’t get the full experience of the other illnesses she might be struggling with.

Conclusion

In all I think this book opened my eyes to what type of a reader I am, what codes do I read under and many more. Before I was reading just to read, and felt either some connection or no connection to the book. I also always assumed what would happen next or if I didn’t like how the book was going I would stop and just forget about the book. As I come to the end I think this book and the other books I was fortunate to read shaped me and I was able to grow into a new reader and writer. I do believe that this journey throughout the class has been very hard and powerful. By hard I mean it was hard for me to see anything else of what I wanted and this shaped me to be more open and seeing further. Before this class started I felt that I was already a powerful reader and writer and now that this class comes to an end I feel that I have become a different type of reader, one who can see the different codes, understands the genre and form and can look beyond the text. 

Inventory

https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/sierras-inventory/

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Slade House

Turtles All the Way Down

The Bell Jar

Fear Gone Wild

Work Cited

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