Ophie's Ghosts

In the opening chapters, the author employs a third-person limited point of view that inhabits Ophie’s consciousness and depicts the narrative world according to her perspective alone. However, in the titled interlude chapters, the narrator inhabits the points of view of various settings, depicting the narrative world according to their perspectives. This formal choice creates an interplay between the protagonist and her whereabouts, inciting much of the narrative tension. Ophie is only 12 years old when the novel opens, but because she is a keen observer with a curious mind, she is highly attuned to her surroundings, and these traits result in a vividly told story, particularly after her father dies. Wherever she goes, she encounters new sensations and sights, and her repeated ghost sightings soon become an extended metaphor for the area’s fraught past. Yet because of her youth and relative inexperience, Ophie is surrounded by a history that she cannot always access or understand, and the titled interludes that personify different places fill the expository gaps by offering direct descriptions of key historical details. The interludes also allow important settings like the Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh, and Daffodil Manor to become quasi-sentient characters in and of themselves. In the subsequent chapters, Ophie’s communion with these settings will help her make sense of her personal and cultural past.

Ophie’s numerous encounters with ghosts emphasize the novel’s focus on The Importance of Addressing Past Injustices, as the “many and varied” “ghosts of Pittsburgh” all carry their own personal memories and unresolved traumas (80), and at the same time, they communally create a collective form of memory that “haunts” the entire area. Sensitized to the ghosts’ presence because of her father’s death, Ophie begins a new life chapter in which she is able to see and converse with ghosts wherever she goes. As she becomes aware of their desires and hears their voices, she becomes the only living witness to their pain, and their appearances foreshadow the importance of past history to the rhythm of Ophie’s present moments. However, her attunement with the spirit world initially confuses and unsettles her because she is still a child and does not know how to navigate the burden of communing with the dead and confronting the burden of her own personal, cultural, and national histories. In the face of her fear, she remains silent. She does not tell the woman on the trolley about the ghost’s communication, and she hesitates to tell Aunt Rose about the ghost in the garden, fearing that if she were to announce the presence of these ghosts and the histories they carry, it would only worsen her alienation. In short, history is a weight that Ophie does not know whether she can bear on her own, and the more ghostly encounters she has with the past, the more truths she must face.

In this context, Aunt Rose assumes the role of Ophie’s archetypal guide, offering her guidance as she navigates the complexity of her personal and cultural histories. Rose is the first person Ophie meets who can also see and communicate with the dead. Her experience validates Ophie’s and helps her make sense of who the dead are and what they want. As Rose tells the girl, “When I go on my walks, I check to see if there are any dead in our neighborhood. […] Most folks just want someone who will hear them, who will see them. The dead are no different” (74). Rose’s words of wisdom stress the idea that the ghosts symbolize a barrage of erased stories, lives, and histories. The spirits’ “business” is “unfinished” because their stories have never been heard, and they have no one to hear and remember them. However, when Ophie arrives, her very presence offers them hope; the spirits at Daffodil Manor see her as someone who will listen to them and pass down their stories so that they will not be forgotten. As the novel progresses, Ophie will have to assert her own wisdom to find a balance between accommodating the ghosts’ needs and keeping herself safe. Rose’s warning that ghosts can be dangerous foreshadows the conflicts that will arise as Ophie becomes more familiar with the resident spirits of Daffodil Manor. As she struggles to make sense of her aunt’s blended caution and pity toward the ghosts, she will gradually develop her own nuanced understanding of the past.