Veronika Decides To Die
45 pages • 1-hour read
Paulo CoelhoVeronika Decides To Die
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Symbols & Motifs
The Arts
The arts (music, literature, painting, etc.) tie Veronika, Eduard, and Paulo Coelho together. Coelho portrays the arts as antithetical to a conventional status quo life: Veronika gives up her love for the piano to pursue the life she is told she must desire; Eduard gives up his love for painting in order to appease his father. Coelho also gave up his love of art to appease his parents briefly (Schaertl, Marika. “Paulo Coelho Interview by Marika Schaertl @ Focus Munich.” www.paulocoelhoblog.com.) The struggle between Coelho and his parents over his desire to pursue creative writing led to his several stays in psychiatric hospitals, much like Eduard’s own story. The arts are emblematic of a life outside of normalcy and thus require one to be “insane” in the book’s vocabulary.
Through the three artists in the novel, Coelho illustrates three different stages on the journey to accepting one’s desire to live authentically against the norm. Veronika’s relationship with art is one of total abjection. She has given up, pre-Villete, on playing the piano. Veronika’s desire to die by suicide is a direct result of refusing her desire to be a pianist. When Veronika plays the piano, she rediscovers the feeling of having a “heart full of love” and wants to live again (162). Veronika’s relationship with art and her suicide attempt symbolize a spiritual death that comes from ignoring one’s inclinations to the arts.
Eduard’s relationship with the arts represents Coelho’s time in psychiatric hospitals as an adolescent. Unlike Veronika, Eduard has not acquiesced to his father’s demands, nor has he given up art; Eduard’s relationship with art occupies a liminal space in Villete, where he decides to live in a “different world” instead of deciding one way or the other.
Coelho, who writes himself into the novel as an author, writes Veronika’s story after the events in Villete. Coelho’s meta-inclusion allows him to represent his own relationship with the arts in relation to his other two artist characters. Coelho is free outside of Villete, voluntarily embracing his identity as an artist and writing about an artist struggling to accept her desire to create. Coelho’s relationship with the arts reflects a reconciliation with the unorthodox path of the artist.
The Moon
The moon is a symbol heavily associated with Veronika’s piano-playing and the allegorical mental health struggles experienced inside Villete. The derogative term “lunatic” is often used to describe the inhabitants of Villete, a word which is etymologically associated with the moon. Popular wisdom once assumed that the phases of the moon affected the mental distress and stability of people with mental health conditions, hence the “luna” in “lunatic.” When Veronika first decides to play the piano in Villete, she plays for a new moon. A new moon occurs at the start of the lunar phase, where the moon appears as an extremely slender sliver or is otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
Veronika loves the new moon because “there was still room for it to grow, to expand, to fill the whole of its surface with light before its inevitable decline” (63). The new moon represents Death and Human Mortality and symbolizes Veronika’s desire to live authentically before she dies. The light that fills out the moon is a metaphor for an authentic or soulful life. Its eventual waning is symbolic of human death. In the novel, a new moon is the beginning of a new life. Veronika plays a sonata solely for this new moon, solidifying the link between the moon and her artistic endeavors. This link echoes the older use of the derogative “lunatic,” as Coelho links art to his allegorical use of “insanity.”
Middle-Class Life
All the named characters in Villete come from middle-class backgrounds. The motif of middle-class life often presents the characters with obstacles to living authentically. Each of the characters’ hurdles is unique to their socioeconomic position in society: Eduard would not feel pressure to give up art if his family’s reputation in elite political circles did not depend on the family dynasty; Veronika would not have been pressured to give up the piano without the possibility of making more money from a more conventional job; Mari suffers panic attacks at the thought of giving up her job as an esteemed lawyer; and Zedka is haunted by her lifestyle as a middle-class housewife, which rubs against her desire to have an affair with her “Impossible Love.”
The barriers to authentic living in Veronika are all unique to the characters’ shared class status. Veronika and Eduard’s parents give their entire lives to ensure that their children can live in a prescribed, materially comfortable way that is otherwise entirely unremarkable. Their parents’ love and the middle-class lives demand that Veronika and Eduard erase their individuality and non-conventional desires to fulfill the desires of their parents.
Middle-class life, as the conventional aspiration of society, is built on a sense of conformity to what ought to be desired. Coelho uses the middle-class life to bind his characters together, as it offers uniquely strong pressures to conform and live an unremarkable life. This pressure to conform allows Coelho to explore the theme of Finding Meaning in an Absurd World, as Dr. Igor argues that convention has no basis in logic and is thus an absurdity.
As the epitome of convention, the middle-class lives laid out for the characters pre-Villete are made to look absurd. The middle-class life is ripe for an exploration of Sanity as Conformity to Normalcy, as the characters’ inability to cope with middle-class life labels them as “insane.”
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