Birdyline Book Blog

Dr. George Berkeley famously asked in the 1600s, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” While a person who reads this quote acknowledges that the tree does, in fact, make a sound, they understand that the real question is whether or not an event without witness has any significance. If the sound is made but not heard, it had no purpose as a sound is meant to be perceived.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a novel that introduces similar limitations to a human life and asks whether it even counts as a life. The main protagonist, Addie, is immortal but instantly forgotten as soon as she steps out of sight of whoever sees her. Therefore, if the sight of her cannot be retained does it count for anything? If she has no effect on time itself she has no impact on the world. What can she do that matters?

Addie’s fatal flaw is her inability to conform to society from the beginning to the end of her story.

Growing up in early 1700s France, her parents expected a typical life for her- including marriage and children and hardly anything else. Addie notes that as she grows up she feels her world shrinking rather than expanding. “The world… tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it.” (Schwab 32) I like this quote as it encompasses both her experience as a person who doesn’t want to conform, but most of all as a woman and how her biological sex poses a threat to her ambition.

Addie meets a woman in the village who is similar to her. This woman, Estele, rejects what it means to be a woman in this time period and is judged for it, but Addie finds her status comforting. Estele also rejects the Catholic faith of the village, choosing instead to worship the “old gods.” She warns Addie that if she chooses to seek out these gods she must never pray to the ones who listen after dark, as they are up to no good.

When Addie prays to the old gods in a moment of desperation the sun has slipped away before she notices, and Addie unintentionally makes a deal with an undefined powerful being. Perhaps it is one of these “old gods,” a demon, or Satan himself. Regardless, he offers Addie the freedom she craves in return for her soul. Addie counters that she needs her soul to be free, and the two eventually come to the agreement- the dark being will receive her soul when she feels she is done with it.

She is now immortal, and wandering the Earth. She finally has the opportunity to meet men her parents haven’t chosen for her, but these meetings are tainted. While she grows attached to a few different lovers over the course of her very long life, even seeking some out night after night, they never remember her and she is thus barred from experiencing any sort of real love. This plotline raises some interesting observations and acts as a metaphor for female invisibility- but that’s a whole other essay.

Addie finally meets a person who can inexplicably remember her- Henry. It is through him that Addie and the reader learn together how much society values achievement and resolution in a human’s life. Henry is notably asked by his parents where his career is leading when he tells them how he has found a job. They also belittle him for not finishing college. One segment of Henry’s past that I think particularly shows this style of thinking is his split from a longtime girlfriend. She rejects his proposal and he is crushed. While this is an appropriate and understandable reaction, it also illustrates how Henry thinks of a relationship leading to a definitive end goal- marriage- and without that achievement the entire connection between him and his girlfriend loses its meaning and importance.

Addie struggles more and more as the book progresses because she is challenged by her invisibility. The book is painful because V.E. Schwab does not attempt to redeem Addie’s hollow form of life. Rather, the book concludes that if her life even counts as one, it is certainly not human, especially in a culture that prioritizes success above all else and defines them it ways that aren’t possible for a person who can’t make any sort of mark on the world.

In one heartbreaking scene, Addie asks a man she meets, “Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?” (Schwab 179) The man’s response is this. “‘I think there are many ways to matter’. He plucks the book from his pocket. ‘These are the words of a man- Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit only goes only to the name on the cover.” (Schwab 179)

On the contrary, the Darkness whom she calls Luc tells her the opposite. “‘Adeline,’ he says, a shade of pity in his voice. ‘You have not been human since the night we met… you are not one of them. You cannot live like them. You cannot love like them. You cannot belong like them.’” (Schwab 372) After hundreds of years, Addie finds herself more like Luc than any human, even Henry. This is the reality that she must exist in for eternity- that the only “person” who could ever truly know her without limitations is the being that cursed her to the life in the first place.

There is no definitive answer to her eternal question. But the novel made my head spin in a good way. So- can a life that never impacted any life around it actually exist? What do you think?