She Just Felt Like Running

In Last Night in Montreal, a novel written by Emily St. John Mandel, we meet a compelling character who seems to have a lot of mystery inter-winded throughout her—Lilia. The book starts off with informing the reader that Lilia was up-ducted at a young age by her father. With that information, the reader is already able to identify early on in the story that Lilia lives in a world attached to mystery and unanswered questions. Why was she abducted? Was her father trying to help, or harm her? Is she still “missing?” Because of Lilia’s early fleeing with her father, she finds it difficult to stay in any situation for too long because running away from things is only way she knows how to live.

According to Silverman in “Re-Writing the Classic Text,” “The proairetic code determines the sequence of events within a story. It is the glue which makes certain that clusters of events will follow each other in a predictable order.”  Within the pages of Last Night in Montreal, the proairetic code is used when comparing two chapters that come right after one another. The juxtaposition shown here is between Lilia’s experience with running away from her mother, and Eli’s perspective of her running away from him. Both of these experiences involve a map, and come right after each other in the text. Lilia’s experience involves a happy memory, and Eli’s experience is partnered with emotional pain and desperation. The reader can see how Eli frantically bought a map the day after Lilia left, in hopes to find her somehow.

The day after she left he bought a map of the continent. He remembered every location she’d told him in her story and he circled the cities she’d passed through in red, looking for a pattern, looking for the next city along the line. If there was a way to get to her, he would. He had an idea that if he stared at the map long enough, he might possibly be able to divine where she had gone (Mandel 44).

The start of chapter 8 is on page 45, the page right after Eli was shown to have bought a map. On this page, reader sees the perspective of how Lilia felt while fleeing with her father, and how a map related to her experience, as well. The way Mandel structures her writing between these events leads us to believe the proairetic code applies here. These two chapters relate to one another, and make sense from a story-telling aspect to appear right after one another. Lilia’s experience with using a map while fleeing is pleasant, as the author describes her to have enjoyed her time with the one her father had bought for the two of them when driving cross-country.

When she was seven, Lilia liked to trace the ink-line ridges of mountains with her fingertips and admire the patterns made by highways across the continental United States. When she was eight, he taught her how to read the map, and by nine she was the navigator. She took enormous pleasure in reading maps. Every town, to her way of thinking, held an alternate life. She liked to close her eyes and touch a spot on the map, open her eyes and move her finger to the nearest place name, and sketch out the future she might have there as he drove (Mandel 45).

The proairetic code is set in place here, but a cultural code also has an influence in this story. As a culture, let’s admit it, we’re a sucker for love stories and happily-ever-afters. Mandel shows Eli chasing after Lilia throughout the story. To the reader, he may come across as the hero who is not giving up on the damaged girl. When examining the map and trying to pinpoint exactly where Lilia is, the reader may look at Eli as a romantic, or Lilia’s knight in shining armor who has come to save the day and finally stop Lilia from running away. A cultural code widely accepted would be that it is appropriate to settle down with someone once you get older, and traveling can be done in your younger years. But, what if somebody felt content traveling their whole lives, and did not want to be found? Should we condemn them as a society, just because their way of life is not conventional? The phrase “running away” has a negative connotation attached to it, but for some it may just be a way of life. If one were to ignore the cultural code set in place here, they could see Eli’s actions are less heroic, and more stalker-ish.

No matter how brave and heroic Eli’s intentions were, Lilia made it clear she did not want to be found. Maybe she liked the idea of being able to have a fresh start whenever she pleased. Maybe she just felt like running.