Celeste's Systems

  Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng is a fiction book about an Asian-European family that loses a daughter after she drowns in a lake. After the daughter’s death, the family begins to learn things about one another that they had never known before. In this book, Celeste Ng uses various systems amongst the Characters, the Plot, and the Setting. The systems that are used create a more complex and dynamic story when they are put together. 

The elements of setting in the book are used together to make Everything I Never Told You more sophisticated. Celeste Ng uses a specific time, place, season, and year in the story to give more context and understanding to the reader. For example, the second line of the book says that the year is 1977, six thirty in the morning, and it is May 3. When looking at these things separately they have little meaning, but when they are put together their meaning is much more dynamic and complex. At the time which the story was taking place there was lots of racial tension and violence. The month and time that is provided also allows the reader the picture a spring morning with the sun rising. Like many other Authors, Celeste Ng uses the various elements of settings in the book to create a complex system.

Celeste Ng creates various relationships and connections amongst the characters in the book to make it more more layered and complex. In this book the main characters are mostly from the Lee family. Lydia Lee, who died after drowning in a lake, is the daughter of James and Marilyn and the sibling of Hannah and Nathan. Throughout the story the author builds on the relationships that the Lee family has with each other and with the other characters. An example of this is the Lee's feelings towards Jack Wolff. Jack is a neighborhood boy who had become close friends with Lydia before her passing. At Lydia's funeral, Nathan aggressively confronts Jack because he thinks that he has something to do with Lydia's death. Hannah holds Nathan back because she thinks of Jack as a friend. Celeste Ng uses these two relationships that Nathan and Hannah have with Jack to make a conflicting and complicated story.

Celeste Ng orders the events that take place in the story in a specific way to create complexity and clarification in the story. In Everything I Never Told You the story line constantly switches from the past to the present to make the story have more context and meaning to it. The present time in this story starts in Chapter one which are some of the first things that take place after Lydia's death. The past time is all of the events that take place before Lydia's death. Celeste Ng often switches from the present to past to give a character thoughts more context. For example, when James Lee first met Marilyn in Chapter two he describes how he felt that he had never belonged in the world. Immediately after that the author switches to the story of James's childhood. Celeste Ng orders the events in a specific way to give more clarification and meaning to the story.

The idea of a system can be interpreted different ways in life and literature. Systems in literature are things that work together to make a complex whole. This can be things like events, characters, setting, and many other elements of a story. It is important that readers are able to identify the things that authors purposley use to give their stories more meaning, context, and complexity.