47 pages • 1 hour read
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
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Symbols & Motifs
Rachel’s Physical Appearance
Greg first interacts with Rachel in Hebrew school to make her best friend, Leah, jealous. Greg likes Leah and believes if he can show her how kind he can be to her friends, Leah is certain to fall in love with him. Leah does fall in love, but with the idea of Greg and Rachel as a couple. They’re cute together, and he makes her laugh. But to Greg, Rachel’s big teeth and frizzy hair are no match for Leah’s beauty.
When Greg first reconnects with Rachel after her diagnosis, her big teeth and frizzy hair are still predominant, as is her unique snort-laugh reaction to just about anything Greg says. She is familiar to Greg, and after an awkward start, they fall into a relatively easy rapport.
During her chemo treatments, Rachel loses her hair, so Greg comes to associate her with her lumpy, bald head or the fuzzy hat she eventually uses to cover it. The sicker she gets, the less he seems to recognize her physically, especially when she becomes too ill to laugh. When she does laugh, Greg notices she must reorganize her face to work with the pain it causes her, and the noise she emits is nothing like the snorts he is so used to hearing. Only in the moments before she dies is he able to see her Rachel-ness despite not being able to see her eyes (she’s asleep) or her hair (it’s gone). By now, he knows her well enough to recognize who she is beyond her physical attributes.
Finding Order in a Chaotic World
In the span of one school semester, Greg risks connection with another human being (who ends up dying), endangers his chances for graduation and college, jeopardizes his only long-term friendship with Earl, and becomes painfully visible at school. So much happens in such a short amount of time that Greg unconsciously seeks control wherever he can find it, and he does so through his use of lists and categories.
High school is a nightmare for Greg, but when he categorizes all the major social groups – from rich kids to gangbangers – and then subdivides those groups by grade, he finds a way to exist in a completely manic world. Girls are equally terrifying to Greg, so he lists what he knows about them and categorizes five ways in which his attempts to date a girl have failed. He becomes so anxious about his first phone call to Rachel that he writes out several different possible scenarios, all with the same outcome: a bewildered Greg and an unhappy Rachel. The lists continue with the problems with Earl’s home life, imagined daily headlines for a teen’s boring life, bullet-pointed thoughts and dialogue for those visiting him in the hospital, and more. List-making and categorizing become Greg’s ways of establishing control over things he has no control over whatsoever: how people feel about him, Earl’s future, and even Rachel’s fate.
Alternating Narrative Styles
A lot of things make Greg uncomfortable, but none more so than deeply honest or emotionally taxing interactions with another human being. When a situation threatens to become too real, Greg often switches the style of his traditional first-person narrative into screenplay mode. Alternating the text in this way gives Greg an out when it comes to offering insight into how he feels about something. If he stays in the traditional format, he will have to talk about his reactions to certain pieces of news, like Rachel’s diagnosis or his friendship with Earl, to move the story along. In screenplay format, he shows a scene while maintaining his tongue-in-cheek stage directions to frame the tone without having to trudge into any emotional reflection. It is a way to develop the story without having to rely on the self-awareness of an emotionally immature 17-year-old.
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