The Crooked Maid And The Goldfinch By Donna Tartt

The degree to which lives and actions are connected poses endless questions regarding the destiny of society. Destiny can be thought of in a few ways, either that it cannot be controlled by mere humans, that one is in charge of one owns destiny, or that destiny is a complicated network of actions, people, and circumstances that result in a destiny that is affected by the person themselves and an innumerable amount of other people. The Crooked Maid by Dan Vyleta and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt propose that destiny is a network that results in an interconnectedness of society by employing major and minor characters, setting, events both personal and global, and the structure to make this point.
The major characters in The Crooked Maid and The
On the way to meeting the principle, a stop at an art gallery results in Theo’s mother being killed in a terrorist attack. After the attack, Theo, in a shocked, delirious state of mind, steals a painting by a famous Dutch artist which is named “The Goldfinch”. This unintentional theft has a myriad of repercussions that affect the rest of Theo’s life. After the terrorist attack, Theo goes to live with a school friend. While there he meets Hobie, whose business partner has also died in the terrorist attack. Theo believes that his life is quite good until his dead-beat dad shows up and takes him to live in Las Vegas. There Theo befriends Boris who is a bad influence on him, introducing him to alcohol and prescription drugs, an addiction that carries on through adulthood. “The Goldfinch” causes much anxiety and depression for Theo until he places it in storage after he runs away to New York to live with Hobie when his father dies in a car accident. While working for Hobie and selling forged pieces of furniture, Boris reappears in Theo’s life, confessing to stealing “The Goldfinch”. Guilt ridden, Boris and Theo go to Amsterdam to retrieve the painting. During the transaction Theo kills a man. Throughout his time in New York and Las Vegas he can see the influence his dad had on his life in the two years that he lived with solely him; “Yet even in death my dad was ineradicable, no
The Crooked Maid has multiple, seemingly random series of events occur, that lead to the intertwining of the characters lives. While at first confusing to the audience as it is unclear how all the storylines will connect, in hindsight it is a masterful way to feature the interrelation between all characters as it accentuates how not one action can be found that was not influenced by anothers actions. While the The Crooked Maid clearly makes the point of the effect of others actions on destiny, it also indicates that there is some larger force in play as well, “‘Have you ever felt the hand of God… It taps you lightly, on the shoulder. You barely feel it, but all the same it almost shatters you bones’” (Vyleta 379). Whereas, The Goldfinch is a retrospective by Theodore “Theo” Decker, chronicling how he could observe, in his old age, the progression of events and the influence of other people that resulted in him being the person he is now. Throughout the novel, the narrator Theo adds comments to his younger self’s decisions that emphasize how he now understands how his actions and others actions have led him to be who he is and how the other characters are. To conclude The Goldfinch, Theo writes,” That life… is short… fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that