Part 2 of Weather by Jenny Offill centers more heavily around ideas of politics, and it becomes clearer how we could make the claim that this is a cli fi novel, as we become more adjusted in Lizzie’s setting as well. This section begins to illustrate people’s political attitudes, and how that relates to climate. The narrator’s thought-like style makes this even easier to see, as we are subject to many experiences and inputs at once–much like the way we experience real life. For example, after short comments on “red, white, and blue popsicles” and voting, she says that people are getting “really sick of being lectured about the glaciers”, and that they’ve heard all about it–they just want to know “what’s going to happen to the American weather?” Lizzie compiles and glazes over these experiences, making it an effective cli-fi novel in its form, as it reflects what Haraway might call the daily anthropocene. It also depicts the worry over our waning attention spans as it relates to our ability to organize for a common cause or priority. We know that climate is a problem, that the city “will begin to experience dramatic, life altering temperatures by 2047”, but there is just so much else going on that snips away at our ability or even our desire to organize critically around these thoughts. For Lizzie, and many of us, this includes our jobs, schools, and relationships, and the same way that she bounces from one topic to the next, each getting just about the same screen time, we give the same amount of brain power to all sorts of random bits of information that we get throughout the day. Although this style of writing might be parallel to some real world, choppy, incoherent thinking, I feel it is still really interesting as a style in the way that it shows us we do not need much detail to get ourselves situated in a story. We have no idea what Henry looks like, we didn’t know who our narrator really was until the end of part 1, we don’t know what they like or don’t like, what they wear, or what their apartment looks like. Much of the time that “typical” novels devote to setting the scene is spent instead on jumping from one thought to the next, and we still can pick up the pieces and understand what is going on, to construct the perhaps irrelevant details ourselves. Maybe even this in itself is a comment on how what we think is important might not actually be necessary in order to effectively move in the world. In the same way we do not know what shoes Lizzie or Sylvia are wearing, it might not matter as much what we look like as what our principles are. We know they are concerned about the environment and are trying to make their points heard, we don’t know what they look like doing it. It reminds me of the discussion in the beginning of the semester regarding Nixon’s Slow Violence, and how technology and social media have created a world where everything is on the same level of importance to us: from morals to politics to our skincare routines. Maybe everything that is missing from Offill’s novel in terms of details is actually done on purpose as a comment on their unnecessariness. 

Another thing about part 2 plot wise is that we get to learn more about Lizzie. We see more clearly some marriage troubles she has, from critiques about her doing work around the house, to having a “real” job, and even annoyance at the amount of time she spends on the phone with her mother. We also see that, just as she avoids people from her son’s school, like Nicolla, they are also avoiding her. As her brother now has responsibilities in his own new family, it might be interesting to see if Lizzie reaches an increasingly isolative place in the novel, and what effect this might have on her thinking patterns. Especially since this section creates emphasis on the increasingly perilous state of the world, alluding to climate change and Trump’s first election, it would seem that it should be most helpful for Lizzie to alleviate her concerns, rather than brushing everything off as a joke. If this novel is meant to be a comment on the way we as a collective handle crises, I wonder what role the other characters are going to play, and if their role is strategic in some way, or merely supplementary to Lizzie. 

How does Jenny Offills weather portray the relationship between personal anxiety and global crises through Lizzie, and in what ways do these external pressures amplify these personal anxieties and existential crises?

In part 2 of Jenny Offill’s novel “Weather”, we can see a more in-depth characteristic of Lizzie. Lizzie seems to be very self-aware of who she is. As the novel continues, we can see a better perspective of how Lizzie feels about certain things. We come to see that she has a dark sense of thought as well as dark humor. So far, the novel has felt as if we were in her head, listening to her thoughts. In the novel it states “… a student tells me failure is not an option and is angered when I laugh. I assume a cheerful manner. I tell her, Hey, me too, I used to have plans! Biggish ones, medium at least…” As the novel demonstrates we can see that subconsciously maybe Lizzie feels a certain way about what her future should’ve looked like, which has led her to become a librarian. Although Lizzie tries to put up a certain act with certain people, as readers we can tell she seems to be struggling a lot within herself. 

Moreover, we can see how Lizzie struggles to be with her husband. They tend to fight over small stuff but it seems like there’s some tension between them. The novel shows a bit of their banter, as states “You don’t really even have a job, do you? Ben says one day when I come home early….”Can you put sheets on his bed” “I fixed the drain” “I made corn.” We can see that there Ben doesn’t seem happy with his wife’s decision to become a librarian, however, Lizzie doesn’t seem to be annoyed by it but rather she faces it with an honest attitude. But Ben still decides to question her and it seems as though Lizzie isn’t bothered by it anymore. 

Lizzie’s personality shows that she seems to be very dark about survival, death, and even small things going on in the world as well. Lizzie goes on to talk about the climate in the world, and how it’s slowly becoming a problem. She seems to be very in tune with how the world is looking, and she knows a lot of dark jokes about the world. Lizzie says “Once sadness was considered one of the deadly sins, but this was later changed to sloth. (Two strikes then). I believe she talks about herself, and how lonely and sad she is but decides not to show it to her family or friends. She seems to be aware that she is struggling within herself but decides not to talk to someone but rather copes with dark humor or jokes about the end of the world.

How are the people of the world affected by climate change outside of the west and how does Ghosh’s novel portray that?

How does Amitav Ghosh critique theories of Western environmentalism in The Hungry Tide through the different roles Piya, Kanai, and Fokir play as productive characters in the narrated world clearly suffering from climate change?