Elements of a Novel: Veronika Decides to Die

Title : Veronika Decides to Die

Author: Paulo Coelho de Souza is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist and the recipient of numerous international awards. He is best known for his widely translated novel The Alchemist.
He was born in Brazil and attended a Jesuit school. As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer. Upon telling his mother this, she responded, "My dear, your father is an engineer. He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?" At 17, Coelho's introversion and opposition to following a traditional path led to his parents committing him to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before being released at the age of 20. Born into a Catholic family, his parents were strict about the religion and faith.Coelho later remarked that "It wasn't that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn't know what to do... They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to save me."At his parents' wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and started using drugs in the 1960s.Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter, composing lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita Lee, and Brazilian icon Raul Seixas. Composing with Raul led to Coelho being associated with magic and occultism, due to the content of some songs.In 1974, Coelho was arrested for "subversive" activities by the ruling military government, who had taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous. Coelho also worked as an actor, journalist, and theatre director before pursuing his writing career.

In 1986, Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a turning point in his life.On the path, Coelho had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage. In an interview, Coelho stated "[In 1986], I was very happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water – to use the metaphor in The Alchemist, I was working, I had a person whom I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer."Coelho would leave his lucrative career as a songwriter and pursue writing full-time.

Coelho married artist Christina Oiticica in 1980. Together they had previously spent half the year in Rio de Janeiro and the other half in a country house in the Pyrenees Mountains of France. Coelho and Oiticica now permanently reside in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1996, Coelho founded the Paulo Coelho Institute, which provides support to children and the elderly. He continues to write, following his own version of The Alchemist's "Language of the World."

Though he was raised in a Catholic family, he left his faith in his 20s. However, he later returned to it and is a devout Catholic now.Nevertheless, his writings have been deemed incompatible with the Catholic faith, because of its New Age, pantheist and relativist contents.

Genre:  Fiction

Settings:

•The War in Bosnia-Serbia-Croatia
    In the early-to-mid 1990's, several regions in Eastern Europe that were once a single country called Yugoslavia participated in what has been variously described as a civil war or a war of aggression. Lingering social, political, and economic uncertainty after the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite, Communist governments were a fertile breeding ground in which centuries old ethnic tensions resurfaced and became violent, with the result that thousands of people, soldiers and civilians alike, were killed. This is the social and political context in which Veronika decides to end her life, the violence and intolerance of the world around her being primary components of the "wrongness" she feels helpless to address.

•Ljubljana, Slovenia
(a few years after the break up of Yugoslavia)
     Slovenia was one of the countries involved in the Bosnia-Serbia-Croatia war. A region with less influence than some of the other combatants, Slovenia suffered a great deal of breakdown during that time. And the reason why Veronika decides to  die is that she wants her country to be recognized.

•Vilette
This is a mental asylum in the purest of its form. This is the safe haven Veronika wanted for so long. Here in this asylum she had met the people who are just like her: Zedka, Mari, Eduard and other elders that are members of the Fraternity who made her life more interesting.

Characterization:

•Veronika
A young librarian with a good life that she nonetheless finds unfulfilling. Though she has a job, friends and family, she feels nothing but apathy toward her life and feels no great draw toward the kind of life that is expected of her. She feels powerless to change her life and feels that things will only get worse as she ages, so makes a relatively passionless decision to end her life in order to find “freedom.” As she waits for the pills to take hold, she reads an article asking, “Where is Slovenia?” and decides to write a letter to the editor, justifying her suicide as a reaction to the article’s belittlement of her home country.

•Eduard
A fine young man who is getting treated for schizophrenia and the man whom Veronika falls in love as she never has before. Born to a rich and powerful Yugoslavian ambassador, Eduard was raised to follow in his father’s footsteps. However, after an accident and a stay in a hospital he developed an ambition to paint. His father strongly disapproved, and pushed him to continue his path toward becoming a diplomat. Afraid to further disappoint him, Eduard buried his dream of painting and followed his father’s wishes. However, in the wake of this decision Eduard loses his grip on reality and becomes diagnosed with schizophrenia and ends up at Villete.

•Zedka
An old lady who's getting treatment for depression, outright states upon meeting Veronika that geniuses such as Einstein and Columbus were thought to be crazy, though they merely “lived in their own worlds.” She is being treated for an obsession over a former lover. Though married with children, she became fixated on tracking him down, and was convinced he was seeking her as well. She directly expresses the novel’s doubts about the nature of madness, stating: ‘…insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.’ ‘We’ve all felt that.’ And all of us, one way or another, are insane.’

•Mari
A wife, mother, and successful lawyer, was treated for intense panic attacks. Though Dr. Igor told her that she could return home, Mari said she wanted to stay to give her husband time to recover for the months of stress prior to her institutionalization. As she, cured of her symptoms, gets ready to leave and resume her life, a colleague tells her that she was being forced to resign. She begs him to let her return, stating “I have lived with two sorts of people: those who have no chance of ever going back into the society and those who are completely cured but who prefer to pretend to be mad rather than face up life’s responsibilities. I want and need to learn myself again, have to convince myself that I’m capable of taking my own decisions.” He remains firm, and she loses her job. Mere days later, a lawyer visits her and informs her that her husband is seeking a divorce. Devastated, she lies and tells Dr. Igor that her symptoms have returned and asks to stay. Though he knows she is lying, he agrees, and Mari becomes exactly the type of reality-avoiding patient she begged her colleague to spare her from embodying.

•Dr. Igor
Veronika's doctor who tells her that she has damaged her heart so much that she only has a few days to live, which she is expected to live out in the institution. psychiatrist attempts a fascinating but provocative experiment. Can you "shock" someone into wanting to live by convincing her that death is imminent? Like a doctor applying defibrillator paddles to a heart attack victim, Dr. Igor's "prognosis" jump-starts Veronika's new appreciation of the world around her. He is the kind of doctor who at first seemed like he just wanted money but in the latter part of the story, his character changed in a way that's more widely appreciated.
•The Fraternity

The elder people in Villete who are often talking about anything under their insanity. They’re introduced in the novel in the first days of Veronika’s first stay in Villete.

Plot

Exposition:

There's a girl named Veronika who had her life in front  of her—decent job, loving parents, friends, high wage earner and a life full of hope. But one day, she decided to kill herself by overdosing herself with pills. No one ever knew why she did it to herself. She even managed to ring an idea that she's killing herself so that Slovenia, her town, will be known to the public. Everyone thinks she's crazy so her parents decided to make her stay in Villette, a mental institution so that she'll be taken cared of by the mental personnel but on and  on, she kept on insisting that  she's not crazy but no one ever believed in her.

Rising Action :

While in Villette she met people who are just like her. First off is a woman named Zedka who makes her realize that being different isn't all that bad.Next are the lunatics that are the members of the Fraternity, these people are just like the usual society group except that they all have their own worlds once they're alone. She even met a lawyer who was self-proclaimed insane named Mari, but though she was claiming it as her weakness, she was the sanest person Veronika ever encountered. She has her own ideals that made her unique. And the last person she ever met inside the institution was Eduard to whom she fall in love with. Eduard was schizophrenic so he tend to have his own world while having the real world at stake. Veronika loved Eduard because though he's not speaking, he's always there when Veronika was at her lowest.

Climax:

When Veronika knew she's about to die in a couple of days after her suicide attempt due to the side effect of  the pills she have took, she did all the things she know that will satisfy her being. She even masturbated in front of Eduard which for most of us, can be so embarrassing but she have nothing to lose besides she'll die anytime soon. After confessing to Eduard her feelings, Eduard speak to her about his feelings. They both escaped from Villette and had their very first date after that, she's just bound to wait for her final breath. Knowing that Eduard loved her, she slept in his arms with the last heap of breath.

Falling Action:

All of a sudden, she woke up that very same moment she think she's going to die. For her, it is really a miracle.

Denouement :

Dr. Igor revealed in the last part that what she made Veronika believed was a lie. It's true that he's working on some research but it's not true that she's going to die. She just test Veronika on how will she act knowing that she only has limited time left in her life.

Theme/s:

"collective madness is called sanity"

Conformity. People conform to live peacefully within society. Peacefully as in to not have to deal with opposing views too much. People conform to make themselves feel as though they have purpose in life. They see others doing the same, they follow suit. It's either to live an easy life or its because it's the only thing they know. Thinking outside the box is too hard for them. Or they never had an imagination to.

Madness. I don't know what madness is. Though I know that I am a madman. It's hard to classify madness because some people can just be having a bad day. While others, their life is just a living hell. And it may not even be because of outside forces. Sometimes the hell is within the person's mind with the way they think. The way other people perceive them and their thoughts in a negative manner despite the intentions being good. Madness in my definition is a state of never finding rest in their mind or their spirit.

Death is something humans have made. Death is just a transitioning point from this reality to the next.

Point of View:
Third-person past tense point of view
For the most part, the narrative unfolds from this type of point of view with its primary focus being on Veronika, her experiences, insights, and feelings and the events of its plot being set in motion in response to her reflections as manifest in her intentions and actions.

Shifting Points of View
There are occasions when the point of view shifts to one or another of the characters she encounters such as Zedka, Mari, Eduard, or Dr. Igor.

Style:
Fable-esque meaning it sort of depict a fable. As what Coelho's novels are known for—simplicity

Book Review:

Personally I really love the book. It talks mainly about a character-driven analysis on the nature of sanity and our society’s pressures to conform, Veronika Decides to Die showcases one woman’s journey toward carving out a meaningful life away from ingrained societal expectations.

Twenty-four-year-old Veronika lives in Slovenia, one of the republics created by the dissolution of Yugoslavia. She works as a librarian by day, and by night carries on like many single women —dating men, occasionally sleeping with them, and returning to a single room she rents at a convent. It is a life, but not a very compelling one. So one day, Veronika decides to end it. Her failed attempt, and her inexplicable reasons for wanting to die, land her in a mental hospital, Vilette.

Veronika's disappointment at having survived sucide is palpable. She imagines the rest of her life filled with disillusionment and monotomy, and vows not to leave Vilette alive. Much to her surprise, however, she learns that a fate she desires awaits her anyway: She is destined to die within a week's time, of a heart damage caused by her suicide attempt. Gradually, this knowledge changes Veronika's perception of death and life.

In the meantime, Vilette's head psychiatrist attempts a fascinating but provocative experiment. Can you "shock" someone into wanting to live by convincing her that death is imminent? Like a doctor applying defibrillator paddles to a heart attack victim, Dr. Igor's "thesis" jump-starts Veronika's new appreciation of the world around her. From within Vilette's controlled environment, she finally allows herself to express the emotions she has never allowed herself to feel: hate and love, anger and joy, disgust and pleasure. Veronika also finds herself being drawn into the lives of other patients who lead constrained but oddly satisfying lives. Eduard, Zedka, and Mari have been sent to Vilette because there doesn't seem to be any other place for them. Their families don't understand them, and they can't adjust to the social structure that doesn't tolerate their individuality. Each of these patients reflects on Veronika's situation in his or her own flash of epiphany, exposing new desire and fresh vision for life that lies outside the asylum's walls.

Vilette is an asylum in the purest sense of the word: a place of protection, where one is shielded from danger. In this case the danger is society. Those who refuse to accept society's rules have two choices: succumb to the majority's perception that they are mad, or struggle against that majority and try to find their own way in the world.

The protective walls of Vilette are liberating to its patients, allowing them to explore their "madness" without criticism or harm. What they discover is both natural and startling. A novel that starts out as contemplation on the expression of conformity and madness, turns into a dazzling exploration of the unconscious choices we make each day between living and dying, despair and liberation.