Dec 26, 2009

Middlesex | Themes

Fate and Free Will

Cal questions the primacy of fate over free will as she examines her and her family's experiences. She begins with the silk worm analogy, tracing the thread to the past that has determined her hermaphroditism. "The thread," she insists, "began on a day two hundred and fifty years ago, when the biology gods, for their own amusement, monkeyed with a gene on a baby's fifth chromosome…. and my destiny fell into place."

James Wood, in his review of the novel for the New Republic, comments that "Eugenides wishes to use his three-generational...