We are not allowed to forget that it is Cal telling us of things that he cannot ever have known. The narrator can follow the buried tracks of these two orphans' feelings as they become first lovers and then, when they emigrate to America posing as cousins, husband and wife. The shocking fact of their incestuous relationship is made unshocking by a narrative that goes back to their early life in a Greek village on the Turkish coast whose insularity determines their intimacy. This mobility of identification becomes a narrative principle.Ĭal's/Callie's condition stems from a genetic mutation consequent on his/her grandparents being siblings. He-who-was-once-she has been given the mobility of identity that makes him or her a suitable inhabitor of other men's and women's minds. His own body is no fixed measure of identity, for Cal the middle-aged narrator is a hermaphrodite who was brought up – and thought of herself – as Calliope, the only daughter of Greek-American parents. "I've left my body in order to occupy others," Cal says on its first page. As he does so, he feels able to tell us what his parents and grandparents did long before he was born, and to tell us what they thought and felt. Cal narrates the history of his own family, a saga that begins in the 1920s and spans three generations. This is but a final, mischievous example of a technique that has been applied throughout the novel. I have to be honest and record Milton's thoughts as they occurred to him." "Right at the end he was no longer thinking about me. Yet, looking back years later, he is able to give us not only a description of the events leading up to Milt's last moments, but an enactment of his father's feelings in his final seconds – his overwhelming irritation at the manner of his own impending death. At the time, Cal is thousands of miles away and finds out what has happened only when his brother tells him over the phone. Near the end of this long novel, Cal is telling us of the death of his estranged father, Milt, in a somewhat farcical car accident.
He is, as the critical jargon has it, "omniscient" – impossibly so.
His first-person narrator, Cal, is consistently allowed to know what has gone on in the heads of several of the other characters. I n Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides deliberately violates one of the basic conventions of narrative fiction.
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