For class on 4-9-2007
I’m having a hard time figuring out what Jennie was exactly. At first she seemed like a ghost, but Eben could touch her and everyone could see her as well; she even rode in Gus’s cab at one point. But she keeps going away and coming back a few weeks or months later looking much older and saying it had been years since she had seen him. Then she washed away by the hurricane, and a newspaper from the current day states that a Jennie Appleton had fallen overboard and was lost at sea during the storm. I’m a little weirded out by this. She seemed real but I was certain she was a ghost anyway. I agree with the idea that this book is a bit spooky, but not scary.
I think Jennie was trying to reach the same age as Eben, she might have even stated that that was what she wanted. But once Jennie reached that point in her life, when she and Eben could be together, she is killed. I feel that Jennie, at the point where she is climbing up the slippery hill, had actually taken her true existence where. She was not going to have to go away anymore, this was the point when she would be with Eben forever. Unfortunately, Jennie decided to come back to Eben during a terrible hurricane and was in turn killed. I just do not know what that girl was and it is bothering me. My theory of Jennie being a ghost could be wrong, since Robert Nathan became angry when the first film clearly portrayed Jennie as a ghost. So I’m as lost as Eben was through the whole novel.