Conundrum Yields Evacuation

In Mary McCarthy’s C.Y.E., the narratee is introduced to an intriguing character, Mary, as she reflects back to a “queerly spelled nickname” and the haunting role is has played in her life. By switching between character filter and narrator slant, the narratee is able to better understand the dichotomy of Mary; that of her young, shy and naïve self, as well as her older, more accomplished and confident self. The narratee only needing to sit back and watch as Mary attempts to resolve the lingering issues the nickname has created in her life, and in my opinion, she is ultimately unsuccessfully at reaching a defensible solution.

The narrator, which we will identify as Mary, is a seemingly witty and confident woman who has an outstanding recollection of her childhood—or so we are led to think. Her reminiscing is sparked when she passes a store named Cye Bernard which prompts her to look back to the suffering she endured during her years in the convent, when two class clowns, Mary Heinrichs and Elinor Henehan, bestowed Mary with the nickname of C.Y.E. Mary is marveled by how simple it was for her to forget this time period and justifies it be stating that “the past is manipulated to serve the interests of the present. For any bureaucracy, amnesia is convenient.” And continues on the say “the name of Trotcky drops out of the chapter on the revolution in the Soviet textbooks” (180). By using her intellect to place the nickname of C.Y.E. in the same category of bureaucracies and assassinated exiles, the narratee can almost safely assume the severity of the nickname.

We will refer to the young, sensitive Mary as C.Y.E. Mary. Through the character filter of C.Y.E. Mary, the narratee is able to empathize with the traumatic period that the nickname created for her.  she would often “lie in bed at night, guessing wildly, as though against time, like the miller’s upstart daughter in Rumpelstiltskin” because she assumed the nickname “must have some more profound meaning” (183). Without being able to crack the code, she accepted her new name, and as a way of accepting defeat and simultaneously ameliorating her pain, she began making a joke of herself.

The interesting component of this story is the fact that Mary’s present self is narrating the story, which I see as a way for her to create some wiggle room for her past self, a way to overcompensate for her childhood insecurities with confident and clever idiosyncrasies, which could easily be a fabrication of the narrator’s imagination; after all, it is a natural human instinct to suppress emotional trauma, so the narrator’s perspective is likely skewed in her favor. The filter created through C.Y.E. Mary was still tainted with the mindset of the narrator. Take for instance the moment in which Elinor approaches Mary to christen her with her nickname. ‘“We have got something for you” [Elinor] said. “Yes?” I said calmly, for really (I now saw) I had known it all along, known that there was something about me that would inevitably appeal to these two strange girls” (182) and also when she remarks that “…but in me there was something overweening, over-eager, over-intense, that had brought upon me the hateful name” (183). I believe it is much easier for the narrator to give herself the assets at her present state in life and that C.Y.E. Mary did not have such a self-actualized way of thinking to grant herself these characteristics. Lastly, Mary is able to easily muster up “a happy solution” to the riddle that is C.Y.E. It was so evident to her that the meaning was simply “Clever Young Egg” (184) and that it was given to her as a backhanded compliment. She provides no way of justifying that this solution is truthful, yet she is pleased with her decision. Through the use of character slant and the narrator’s point, the narratee was introduced to the emotional torture that this nickname truly had, so I don’t believe that Mary would so easily be able to solve and dismiss such an important puzzle in her life, the puzzle of C.Y.E.