Olivetti

“I’m here for you, I wanted to say as her fingers shuddered against me. You can tell me.

She’d returned, like old times, to pour out her pain on my keys.”

This line of interior monologue from Olivetti’s viewpoint reveals his strong feelings about Beatrice. Olivetti alludes to Beatrice’s troubled past, which she wrote about on Olivetti. At this early point in the narrative, the emotional intensity combined with a strategic lack of detail heightens the narrative’s suspense. The word “shuddered” conveys a visceral sense of Beatrice’s unspoken pain and suffering, and Olivetti’s desperately wistful presence—of which Beatrice remains unaware—emphasizes his role as a spectator in the events of his own life. As his narrative voice conveys these images, it is clear that his main purpose in the novel is to provide key insights into the past, activating the story’s focus on The Healing Power of Memory.

“Texting wasn’t something I did. My phone lived at the bottom of my backpack, and never really had a reason to come out. Phones were for people who had friends. Or in case of emergencies. I didn’t have either of those.”

Ernest’s youthful, self-deprecating tone shines through in this moment of interior monologue, providing a direct contrast to Olivetti’s self-assured, mature ruminations. As the only two viewpoints in the novel, these first-person perspectives work together to tell the story from different angles. Both characters are struggling with specific challenges that tie into the broader conflict of finding the missing Beatrice. Ernest, as his bitterly resigned tone suggests, is deeply aware of his social awkwardness and isolation.