Fated
Symbolism
This section is intended to be read after completion of the book. Reading any part of it will give most away. But as you wish.
I’ll start with the number thirteen since it is all over the book. There are thirteen chapters. The book spans a total of thirteen days. Kurt’s father has been dead for thirteen years. Autumn and Kurt take track thirteen to the Fall Festival. Kurt walks thirteen blocks to Rebecca’s house and discovers that the reason she left his mother’s wake early was because she is seeing someone else. Autumn lives at Thirteen Thirty-Three North Lily. The children at the camp for the terminally ill range in age from six to thirteen. There are more. I’ll leave it at this, though. But, like the number, all references are ominous. For the first seven chapters, God is in lowercase. A literary agent who expressed interest in the novel sent me back a marked copy of the pages she requested. On each, she had taken the time to let me know in red ink that God should be capitalized. I never responded after that. It obviously represents a loss of his faith. However, as you will notice, when he is with Autumn from Chapters 8 through 12, I do capitalize it again as she has returned his belief. In Chapter 13, though, it is back down again.
Chapters 2 through 13 all begin with quotations. Except for three of them, the authors who penned these all committed suicide. Now for the three quotations where the authors did not kill themselves. In Chapter 7, I open with Sartre. It is were Kurt’s
suicide attempt is interrupted. Chapter 12 starts with Christina Rossetti. Like Sartre, Ms. Rossetti did not kill herself but she did die of cancer. But it is here that Autumn also dies, of leukemia, a cancer of the blood. Chapter 13 begins with a quote from a friend of mine: “Suicide is the envy of all those in pain.” It is ambiguous, for a reason, in case an observant reader was able to catch on. However, this is the last person in the world who would end his own life. And therefore, Kurt winds up making it out alive.
Names within the novel. Yes, I did choose the name of my lead for Kurt Cobain. It has a little history. Four days after my mother died, he killed himself. For some reason, it put the whole ordeal into perspective. I’m still not sure why. I suppose that perhaps it was because I realized that no one makes it out of here alive. Anyway, I didn’t cheapen it with continued references. There is only one point in the book where I allude to it. In Chapter 10, Autumn asks Kurt what she should wear to The Underground. He replies, “Just come as you are. The way I would want you to be.” The name of Autumn’s doctor is Ellen Heitzman. This was chosen because it is the name of the girl for whom the book is dedicated to. Autumn I selected because it is the season that exhales its last warm breath into arms of an awaiting cold winter air. April, Rebecca’s sister, is both Autumn’s opposite and her like. She is a good heart, rides a bicycle, adores Kurt, and even resembles Autumn in appearance. But April is a month that gives start to new life. And unlike Autumn, she will make it out of this novel.
Chapter 2. Here I open with the lines from the Joy Division song “New Dawn Fades.” The last words I borrow are “. . . a loaded gun won’t set you free, so you say.” It portends the ending.
Chapter 3. Subculture. Taken from the Pixies song “Subbacultcha.” All you Pixies fan do rejoice because I was not yet done with Frank Black. In the chapter, Kurt meets a girl named Velouria. The Pixies have a song called “Velouria.” The description is of her looking like an erotic vulture. These are lyrics within “Subbacultcha.” All tied neatly back, huh? Velouria talks to Kurt about the writer Richard Bach. In Chapter 13, Kurt happens upon a boy named Jonathan who is drawing seagulls on the sidewalk of the park. Yes, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The book by Bach. Again, tied quite nice. Also within this scene, Kurt gives Velouria his gold cross and chain. She gives him an inverted silver cross from her ear. It is an exchange of faiths. However, in Chapter 9, he does get a chain and cross back after saving a little boy from drowning.
Chapter 4 starts out with a quote by Sylvia Plath. It is here, at the end of the chapter, where Kurt spots a girl sitting on the swings. It is Autumn. In Chapter 8 where he meets her for the first time, she is reading a biography of Plath. The tie-in goes further. Chapter 8 opens with a quote by Anne Sexton. The poem is called “On Sylvia.” I always get this question. While Kurt is driving, he says: “Living vicariously in a world with a seven-letter alphabet, I changed scenes in three-minute intervals.” I thought it was
obvious. He is talking about music here. And the song he is listening to in the following paragraph is “Backstreets” by Bruce Springstein. When picking up Rebecca, there are three paragraphs that describe how Kurt sees her. Later on, Chapter 10, I again use three paragraphs to describe how he sees Autumn before he gets in his car. The descriptions are basically inverted, mirrors of each other—the writing in reverse. He also drives west to Rebecca’s house, while he drives east to Autumn’s. This was used to signal the sunset of a relationship and the dawn of a new one. I use east and west, along with left and right, at other points points in the novel. Since the heart is on the left side, it is used to represent compassion.
Chapter 5: Just a few things here. It is entitled Black because Kurt’s mom dies in this chapter. I stole it from the song on the album Ten by Pearl Jam. When Kurt visits April in the tree house, I reference another set of lyrics from them. On her walls, she has written “I don’t question our existence, I just question our modern needs.” The physician attending to Kurt’s mom is Dr. Crane. He is a heart-surgeon. Hart Crane was another suicide and Kurt’s mother, in essence, did commit suicide by drinking herself to the grave. A note of fact: The scene at the very end where Kurt writes the lines “Like here with, like anywhere without, I will always be with you” were copied from when I wrote, in chalk, the very same words to my mother after she had just died.
Chapter 6: Kurt’s whispered words to Rebecca are from The Cure’s song “Disintegration.”
Chapter 7. The lyrics to the song are from the “The Ledge” by The Replacements. I believe that the song was banned from MTV due to the subject of it being suicide. The rest of what is contained within you will have to write me. I’m not about to elaborate here.
Chapter 8. Oh, this is one of my favorites. Kurt is doing the crossword puzzle that his mother never had the chance to finish. He fills in the last five clues. In order, they are as follows: Omen, Chapter, Twelve, Laments, Fall. In Chapter 12, Autumn dies. Here is also the beginning of where I start to offer clues that Autumn is sick. It’s a very warm fall night, but Kurt has to offer her his flannel because she is cold. Also, she mentions to him that her family has moved in order to be closer to her doctor. At the end, Kurt reads through the biography of Sylvia Plath. This one took a while to write as it is a pastiche of some of her poems. Each line was slightly altered in order to sum up her life.
Chapter 9. There are two references to me in the book. Both occur here. The first is when Kurt is walking in the cemetery to visit the graves of his parents. While leaving, he comes across a gravestone that reads: I made it here the hard way – Julia Wynd Milhoff. Rearrange the letters and you get William John Duffy. The second is when Kurt saves
the little boy from drowning. The boy is named Billy and represents that we really can only save ourselves. Note: I usually write to my scenes if I don’t have a good feel for them. For the scene on the steamboat, I traveled to New Orleans in order to capture the moment. When Kurt meets Autumn again in the park she tells him that she went to the bookstore that day and picked up Anna Karenina. He asks her what she thought of the ending. She replies that she thought Ms. Karenina should have looked both ways before crossing. Obviously, she understands that Anna Karenina killed herself but this is her denial of suicide.
Chapter 10. The title Sparkle and Fade is taken from the song “Summerland” by Everclear. The lyrics will appear in the scene when they are first walking into The Underground. It seemed perfect for the chapter as everything first sparkles and then fades at the end. Other lyrics within are from the band Seaweed, “Start With,” from The Smashing Pumpkins, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and from Bruce Cockburn, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.” The Underground, while fictitious, is a composite of many of the clubs that I had been hanging around at the time. Probably, it most resembles a combination of The Exit and Neos. Both here in Chicago. The camp for the terminally ill children is also a creation of my mind. However, it was dreamed up after reading the books by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. The women who runs the camp in the novel is named Elizabeth. One of my favorite scenes in the book is where Kurt is talking to the little girl
who is dying of brain cancer. You will see that this very poignant conversation is broken up by some mundane chatter while they are roasting marshmallows. It is the juxtaposition of life’s urgency against some of its most basic, but precious offerings.
Chapter 11. The scene with the old man, Charlie, was taken from a special I saw on HBO. Kurt brings Autumn a book here. It is The Little Prince, one he acquired from a little girl whom he met in the library while he was researching Autumn's disease. Seemingly a harmless gift, it is a story with a child-suicide theme. She doesn't understand it, though, as never in her life has she had the chance to hear it till the end.
Chapter 12 was a play on words. It is entitled Morning. Once again it is the chapter where Autumn dies. In Chapter 5, April reads a poem to Kurt called "Winter Mourning." And she makes sure to spell it out for him so that he is not mistaken.
Chapter 13. As I mentioned, the number thirteen plays a significant role in the book. Near the end, I give descriptions of the park, Kurt’s house, the lake, the coffee shop, etc. They are all in order with respect to the scenes that open the book. If you count them, there are fourteen in total. Not the thirteen as the ominous number has always presented itself. And the reason for this is that Kurt lives. But if you notice, I gave April two paragraphs instead of one. So, she is the person who breaks the fate he thought he was destined to fulfill. The scene where Kurt buys a gun is real to life. I took a night
away from the bars and sat out on Halsted Street to see if I could really purchase one. It played out pretty much as it did in the book, except for the part where the guy comes back with the gun. The man I met never returned. And while waiting in vain, it was here that I met B.J. The story she tells though is mine. The denouement: A game of Russian roulette with God. God, I love that. But he does live in the end. I don’t know why people think this is ambiguous. I thought it was pretty straightforward. He has taken the breath from Autumn and learned, but still not forgiving of God.
I didn't put down all of the symbolism here. There's more within the pages. However, I will leave you to find the rest.