CupsOfSilver

People whisper lies and secrets to and fro throughout their daily lives; at times they could be discussing hot topics of gossip, at other times they could be merely reminding themselves of a subject. Every person at some point in time will believe a lie, hear a secret, or tell a lie. The greatest lies are the ones people tell themselves over and over again. Throughout the novel, Everything is Illuminated the lies characters tell themselves and others are a major theme. 

Yankel the disgraced ususer of Trachimbrod tells the greatest lies to himself in secret and his adoptive daughter, Brod. It all started for Yankel with his wife leaving him for another man. “I am not sad” he would tell himself daily like a sacred mantra in hopes of one day the statement becoming true. “I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself.” His sadness was a repeated secret and a lie he carried with him his entire life. The other great secret Yankel kept to himself was the truth about his adoptive daughter’s birth and mother. To answer all the questions Brod’s young mind could form Yankel had to fabricate grand stories and adventures about the never-wife and how Brod came to be from the world. “He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of course, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do?” Eventually one could read that Yankel became so tied up within the nets of his secrets and his fantastical stories that he also convinced himself that they were matters of fact rather than fiction. “It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remembers in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower’s remembrances that much more convincing and his pain that much more real.” The pair kept many secrets from each other; from Brod’s blooming into puberty to Yankel secretly reading Brod’s dairy while she bathed and faking his age so that Brod would never be concerned with losing her father.

    Brod, Yankel’s adoptive daughter, was not innocent in the sense of telling the truth and never lying. She kept many secrets from Yankel, the biggest being her internal world. Brod never loved Yankel, she barely knew the man and she could not comprehend the true meaning of loving anything. “…she repeats things until they are true, or until she can’t tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.” Instead, both characters gave each other the closest thing to a deserving recipient of love the other would find. Brod would wear the abacus bead not because she had to but because it was how she could show her never-love to Yankel. When Yankel said that he would die for Brod what he meant was that he would die for the love he felt for Brod. Brod at twelve years old was wise and truthful enough to lie to Yankel about love. “They reciprocated the great and saving lie–that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things–willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.” Later in Brod’s life, she would lie to her husband about loving him, and as his days on earth became numbered she would pretend to be in love with the Kolker so that he would feel happy as his life withered away. 

    Alexander, one of the main characters, uses the method of telling lies to his family and Jonathan to impress them and improve their point of view of himself. Alexander lied about his carnal relationships with women and how he would go to parties and clubs. A reason for creating such lies was to impress his younger brother so that he would feel that Alexander was a premium sibling and so that he would protect his younger brother from the harshness of their family’s crude dynamic. “I present not-truths to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.” Another reason to lie about his social life was so that his father would not think Alexander was a degenerate and so that he would receive money to go clubbing that would instead be stashed away in hopes of Alexander travelling to America. 

    One of the greater secret keepers within the novel is Alexander’s grandfather, Alex. He keeps his grievances a secret to all but himself until ultimately he ends his own life. Alex attempts to cover his sadness over losing his wife but never fully succeeds in maintaining the secret. Often Alexander would wake Alex from a nap and his wife’s name, Anna, would be the first words released from the elder’s mouth. He also keeps his guilt for causing his best friend’s deaths a secret. Alex keeps secret his loneliness, his regret, and the truth about his eyesight. In truth, he does not need his seeing-eye dog, Sammy Davis, Junior Junior, and in truth, Alex is very alone within the world. “Of course I have ghosts.” Alex’s greatest secret has been the events of the path in which forever altered his future. 

“If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand…… But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a non-approximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we’ve got.” Secrets and lies surround each character within the novel, therefore the lies characters tell themselves and others is a major theme. People tell secrets and lie many times throughout their lives. Sometimes we whisper merely short white lies to enhance a story or to impress others, at other times we manufacture great fables of fiction that ultimately come back to haunt us like bad whiplash; therefore “..try to live so that you can always tell the truth.”