Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Enduring Impact of Trauma
Shame and the Stigmatization of Pain
Projection and Denial
The Vicious Circle of Isolation and Social Awkwardness
Summary
Analysis
Raymond sends Eleanor an email next Tuesday. His abbreviated grammar and spelling choices prove to Eleanor that, as she expected, he is “semiliterate.” Raymond asks Eleanor if she’d like to go to Sammy’s son Keith’s 40th birthday party with him on Saturday. Excited to attend another party, Eleanor accepts Raymond’s invitation, replying to his casual message with stiff, formal language.
Eleanor is quick to criticize Raymond’s abbreviated language, calling him “semiliterate,” but she never extends the same disdain to the musician’s similarly casual, abbreviated tweets. This inconsistency reinforces how significantly Eleanor’s obsession with the musician is rooted in denial and delusion.
Themes
That afternoon, Eleanor heads to Heliotrope, Laura’s salon, for her haircut. The salon is loud and full of fashionably dressed staff. Laura arrives and situates Eleanor in a chair. Laura complains about having Sammy stay with her, and Eleanor sympathizes with having difficult parents. Eleanor tells Laura she can do whatever she wants with her hair, and Laura arranges to give her a bob haircut with bangs and caramel and honey-colored highlights. To Eleanor’s delight, Laura sets her up with a magazine and a cappuccino before getting to work on her hair.
Eleanor is often opposed to small talk—but when she actually gives it a try with Laura, she discovers that she can relate to Laura about difficult parents. The more Eleanor practices small talk, the more comfortable and worthwhile it becomes for her.
Themes
As Eleanor waits for her highlights to finish developing, a vague memory of brushing someone’s hair—someone “smaller than [her]”—interrupts her happiness. Eleanor normally drinks vodka to erase thoughts like these.
One of the reasons Eleanor is so hesitant to put herself out there is because so many things trigger traumatic moments form her past and cause her to break down: here, the feeling of Laura brushing her hair triggers an unconscious memory of brushing someone else’s hair. The fact that this memory comes to Eleanor as a traumatic flashback implies that Eleanor associates the person whose hair she is brushing with her traumatic past, and the detail that this person was “smaller than [her]” suggests that the person was younger than Eleanor—perhaps a young child.
Themes
When the buzzer goes off, Laura leads Eleanor to the back of the shop to rinse the dye from her hair. As she rinses, Laura comments on the tension she feels in Eleanor’s scalp. After the color is rinsed out, Laura cuts Eleanor’s hair. When she’s finished, Eleanor looks in the mirror and tears up: “you’ve made me shiny, Laura,” she says. The bangs Laura cut sweep over the right side of Eleanor’s face, covering her scar.
Eleanor’s tense scalp reveals the toll her repressed loneliness and trauma takes on her body; Eleanor can insist that she’s fine all she wants, but her body betrays this lie. Eleanor likes her “shiny” haircut because it conceals her scar, symbolically erasing the event or events that gave it to her.
Themes
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