Eileen

“There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.”

The narrator opens her story by distancing herself from the woman she was fifty years earlier. She gives her 24-year-old self a different name than the one she currently uses—Eileen. The narrator is intent on separating her current identity from her past self.

“That car was the one thing in my life that gave me any hope. It was my only means of escape.”

Though Eileen’s car has a broken exhaust pipe, she does not fix it or look to buy a new one. She is attached to the car as it represents her way out of X-ville; she has long planned to run away to New York City and start her life over.

“I didn’t know there were others like me in the world, those who didn’t ‘fit in,’ as people like to put it. Furthermore, as is typical for any isolated, intelligent young person, I thought I was the only one with any consciousness, any awareness of how odd it was to be alive, to be a creature on this strange planet Earth.”

Eileen hates living in X-ville. She considers herself to be fundamentally different than the people she interacts with on a daily basis. These lines also reflect Eileen’s self-obsession and egoism.