On All The Bright Places

All the bright places by Jennifer Niven is a novel revolving around a relationship between two high school teenagers going through difficult times trying to make sense of the pain in their lives.

Theodore finch and violet Markey are both troubled teenagers. They meet at the ledge of the school's bell tower, both contemplating suicide. For violet, having recently lost her sister to a car accident, is handling the grief poorly, while finch who suffers from mental illness that is misunderstood by everyone around him and misinterpreted as a sign of lack of control.

Niven’s main character Theodore Finch asks himself, “Is today a good day to die?”—introducing suicide, one of the main themes of the book, in the very first line—as he stands on the ledge of a bell tower at his high school. Finch has a mental illness. Readers can see that what Finch is going through is bipolar disorder though “depression” and “mania” are never mentioned, and he doesn’t receive his diagnosis until well into the book. Instead, he uses terms like “Awake,” “Long Drop” and “Asleep” to describe the cycles of his mood. For most people, being awake is just the opposite state of being asleep, where to Finch it is a state of being aware of everyone else's life but also himself. As his “Long Drop” nears closer, tension builds around Finch’s frame of mind. His bipolar disorder isn't accredited by his family and friends. To be told by a health professional that you are unwell, then told by the people who are supposed to care about you that you're fine creates some tricky incongruity in the mind. This frustration at not being understood leads him to lose touch with everything stable around him.

Niven then introduces Violet Markey, who also finds herself on top of the bell tower, though she doesn’t fully understand how she got there.

But while Finch considers ending his life, he simultaneously teaches the grief-stricken Violet how to live hers. Between the two of them, they try to diagnose the problems in their minds in a way that will keep them both healthy and maybe even happy.

As the story is set in high school, the maturity level of the characters is an important factor and since they are teenagers overwhelmed with emotions, they are unable to look beyond their problems. Due to lack of perceptive they tend to look at suicide as a convenient solution to end their pain. Throughout the book, Niven emphasizes how someone going through mental health challenges can believe that suicide is a reasonable solution to their condition.

The story is told from two different perspectives, throughout the book we switch back and forth between the two narrators (Finch and Violet) point of view as each chapter is helpfully titled "Finch" or "Violet" so we know who is saying what, but their voices are different enough that labels are not necessarily needed. Violet's voice is even and thoughtful. She is always thinking. She speaks in calm and controlled sentences.

Finch tends to ramble when he is having a manic episode. Towards the end of the book as he is falling into a depression, his chapters become more short and fragmentary. Pretty soon after that, we stop hearing from him altogether.

Finch regularly considers all the different ways he could end his life, logging them with a list of pros and cons. The really useful thing about switching between these two points of view is that we get a clear, full picture of Finch's mental status (which is something that no character. including Finch himself has). From Finch, we get reports of what his episodes feel like from the inside. From Violet, we learn what they look like from the outside. Finch's behavior throughout his chapters demonstrates the characteristic manic periods of impulsive excitability as well as the lethargic, pointless mindset during the depressive periods.

Finch runs away from home, and only Violet seems to be looking for him. He sends her mysterious texts while he visits the remainder of the locations for their unfinished project, but Violet doesn’t understand them until much later.

A month after he has disappeared, Finch sends an email to every single person he knows. He is saying goodbye. Violet, in a panic, figures out that he has drowned himself at the Blue Hole. She goes there and discovers she is right. She is distraught. She manages to decode the texts Finch had sent her, and at the last location they were supposed to visit together, Finch wrote a song for her. This helps the healing process, and convinces Violet that Finch’s suicide was not her fault.

Finch's final actions revolve around Violet and making sure she sees wonderful places within their town. After he dies Violet says: "Even from the floor of your closet, you showed the world to me." . His final acts prove his selflessness and capacity for love.

The book is divided into three parts, each part has a symbol. The first part has the symbol of a bird, the bird is from an incident from Finch's childhood, it might've been the main reason that has triggered his Bipolar disorder.

As for the second part ,the one with the bird and the flower, is where Finch and Violet's relationship is developing. Towards the end of this part it focuses more on how Violet's character is finding herself again, making friends, driving again and starting on her new web magazine called Germ. On the other hand, Finch's character is withdrawing into despair and becoming distant.

The last part, with just the flower, is all about Violet decoding Finch's text and going on the remaining wandering for their project and during that she learns how it was not her fault that Eleanor and Finch are dead. And that Finch, even though he's dead, is guiding her through a process of healing.

This book makes an interesting commentary regarding mental health and teenage psychology. Violet and Finch's characters present two sides to a coin whose currency is often devalued in society. These two teenagers have more to grapple with than typical drama and nightly homework that plague everyone during the high school years. They have symptoms, stigma and the question of why life is worth living to contend with ,and Niven manages to showcase just how difficult mental illness is, especially during adolescence when mental health conditions often onset. Niven's novel points out the need for education on mental health and emphasizes how someone going through mental challenges can believe that suicide is a reasonable solution to their condition. Both Finch and Violet need help, but the people around them don't know how to handle the discomfort they personally experience when around the mentally unstable. Their situation raises the question of why the education system, which commonly deals with depressed teens, is not educating students about how to identify and respond to unstable mental health.

Finch knows that he needs help, but nobody is willing to believe him. He is afraid to ask for help because of the human need to label and categorize the human population, a result of which is the alienation of those who do not fit. Instead of trying to understand the situation, whatever is done can One of the most important changes that can be made when talking about mental illness is to stop labeling people as diseases. Instead of saying someone is a bipolar or a schizophrenic, for example, the language should be “This is a person who has bipolar disorder” or “This person has schizophrenia.” Speaking and writing in a way that acknowledges the person first, then the condition or disability. It helps people understand that the person isn’t the disease, the person has the illness, It doesn’t stigmatize the person, it gets to the point that the person has something that needs to be evaluated and treated. Failing to cultivate the discipline and untrained on how to find the answers to do so, Finch loses hope and kills himself.

"How could they do this?" Is a common question in the aftermath of a suicide that, though typically innocent in nature, is loaded with crucial misunderstandings about suicide and, in some cases, mental illness. The problem lies partly in the language. Asking "how someone could do this" puts responsibility on the victim, just as the phrase "committed suicide" suggests an almost criminal intent. This is why mental health advocates usually employ the term "died by suicide" , as it removes culpability from the person who has lost their life and allows a discussion about the disease or disorder from which they were suffering. "Battling demons", for example, remains a common catchphrase for the media and the public when it comes to mental health issues. As the vocabulary of the brain evolves, there's a growing effort to exorcise "demons", "inner monsters" and other outdated words that imply disorders are supernatural or immoral. A term like "demon" casts a negative light and subtly enforces a moral dimension that's implicit in a lot of stereotypes of mental illnesses. It is not a moral failing or evidence of a character flow, but a chronic disease of the brain that deserves our compassion and care to be shown to people living with mental illnesses.

By the end of the novel, Violet has worked through the grief at the loss of her sister. She had seriously struggled to move past her loss, but Finch helped. He noticed her, looked after her and sympathized with her. Since they both wrestled with suicidal tendencies, they had helped one another. "No more winter at all. Finch, you brought me spring" looking back, Violet thanks Finch for bringing her through her season of grief and desperation.

In the end, although tragic, the novel encourages the reader to believe everything will work itself somehow. The book concludes in a way that makes readers understand that when you live with mental illness, sometimes you have happy endings and sometimes you don't.