Tragicomic Train
The opening line of Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis is both original and inventive.
It's original because it begins with "And", as if we'd been in conversation with the narrator before the novel starts. And we're just picking up where we left off.
It's inventive because it's just one sentence. But it's 140 words long. It must've one of the lowest readability of all opening lines ever written. Yet it works.
It works because the narrator comically mimics the speech pattern of the girl, who has confided in him. A twenty-something girl, who, when eighteen, lost her virginity to someone "who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie." You've got to love the vagueness of that tragic phrase. And you've got to love that the only comment the narrator makes is that she lost her virginity "late", as if she were somehow leading a conservative lifestyle, which makes you wonder about how wild his life must be.
We don't know where this tragicomic train is headed. It could even be an accident waiting to happen. But we don't care. We just have to jump on. And hold on. If we did anything else, we'd only regret it.
“And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or a Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.”
Alberico Collina
The opening line of Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis is both original and inventive.
It's original because it begins with "And", as if we'd been in conversation with the narrator before the novel starts. And we're just picking up where we left off.
It's inventive because it's just one sentence. But it's 140 words long. It must've one of the lowest readability of all opening lines ever written. Yet it works.
It works because the narrator comically mimics the speech pattern of the girl, who has confided in him. A twenty-something girl, who, when eighteen, lost her virginity to someone "who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie." You've got to love the vagueness of that tragic phrase. And you've got to love that the only comment the narrator makes is that she lost her virginity "late", as if she were somehow leading a conservative lifestyle, which makes you wonder about how wild his life must be.
We don't know where this tragicomic train is headed. It could even be an accident waiting to happen. But we don't care. We just have to jump on. And hold on. If we did anything else, we'd only regret it.
“And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or a Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.”
Alberico Collina
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