Penpal

The first two chapters provide a metanarrative framework for the chapters that follow, establishing that the narrator is telling the story of his childhood long after the fact and that everything he’s presenting is part of his recollection. As a result, much of the first chapter centers on the unreliable nature of memory and the ways the mind deceives itself to preserve emotional stability.

The narrator declares that he remembers everything about his childhood, implying that he has become conscious of previously forgotten facts, which now threaten his emotional stability. An important aspect of this framework is its structural conceit: The narrator deliberately presents the story of his childhood out of chronological order to simulate his experience of remembering what happened to him. This emphasizes the gap between objective history and subjective memory. Although a chronological retelling of the narrator’s childhood might have had fewer narrative gaps, the curated structure that defines the narrator’s reflection maximizes the emotional effect of the events. In other words, how the events made him feel is just as important as what happened. This subtly introduces one of the novel’s major themes, The Cost of Knowing the Truth.

The narrator’s stated intentions reveal a challenge: specifically, how to navigate the gaps in his memory while also preserving clarity and coherence in the larger narrative. Because the book is a novel rather than a short story collection, the narrator’s recollections require unity: The chapters must function as pieces of a unified whole instead of pieces that simply resonate with each other thematically. The narrator resolves this by underscoring the role that context plays in elucidating the larger story: “The memories were always there—you just needed to be reminded” (6). Throughout the book, the narrator introduces elements that at first seem insignificant but gain importance as the story unfolds. Chapter 2, for instance, introduces visual or narrative elements that initially seem incongruous with the environment in which they appear, like the shark-shaped pool float the narrator sees when he wakes up in the woods. In the moment, the narrator doesn’t acknowledge this or provide the context for the pool float when he sees it. The specificity and incongruence of the float’s details, however, fix it in readers’ minds so that when it reappears in Chapters 4 and 5, readers easily recall its first appearance.

In addition, the narrator emphasizes the importance of his relationship with his mother in influencing the narrative’s structure. This doesn’t free her, however, from having her own feelings about the story’s events. The narrator describes their conversations as “strained,” which implies that the he tried to wrest details from her—and that his mother resisted his attempts to learn the truth and may have, in some cases, actively allowed gaps to form in his memory. More than underscoring the traumatic nature of these memories, the mother’s resistance hints at her protectiveness, which characterizes her for the rest of the novel, introducing another of its major themes, A Parent’s Instinct to Protect Their Child. Evidently, this dynamic is especially intense because the narrator and his mother have only each other to support as family members. While the narrator references his grandfather in Chapter 2, he and his mother are the only residents of their house, which heightens her role as the person responsible for his well-being.

Chapter 2, marks the formal start of the narrator’s recollections and helps develop the setting of the narrator’s neighborhood, a residential district of a growing rural town, against the edge of the woods. The woods are large enough for the narrator to establish that he hasn’t explored the entire area by the time he wakes up there. This increases the tension in the chapter as the exact size and geography of the woods highlight the narrator’s sense of dread. The narrator identifies some significant landmarks within the woods, such as the pool float and the Christmas tree pile. These details help signal the narrator’s progress as a simple indication of how far he has gone through the woods.

The second chapter also begins to establish the overarching threat of the novel, which the chapter’s ending affirms. Although the narrator has played with the abstract fantasy of monsters in the woods, it’s evident that something or someone took him to the woods at night and tried to pass off his disappearance as an intentional act. This raises several questions about the intentions of this potential antagonist, including the reason for their interest in the narrator, how they obtained details about his life so that they could write the note, and why they chose to take him to that part of the woods. These are the initial mysteries that the novel presents and resolves as the story progresses.