Big Swiss

The act of transcription is both Greta’s literal job and a motif that structures the novel’s exploration of her emotional disconnection. In transcription, Greta can live vicariously through other people’s problems and joys. Greta mistakes intimate knowledge of a person’s life for intimate connection.

Greta’s misidentification of knowledge-as-intimacy reveals her inability to process her own psychological trauma. The transcripts demonstrate the courage and vulnerability of other people who are working on knowing themselves more, while Greta refuses to look deeper into herself and undergo the same self-reflection. Structurally, the novel’s use of transcripts reveals important perceptions of Greta that Beagin’s third-person limited point-of-view wouldn’t otherwise develop.

The phantom glass in Greta’s foot is a symbol for the pain that her unresolved trauma causes her. When Greta’s relationship with Big Swiss becomes more stressful, demanding, and precarious, Greta’s stress manifests the phantom glass. She believes that there is a shard of glass stuck in her right foot, and she tries to dig it out, causing self-harm. The shard of glass doesn’t exist. The injury to the right foot evokes Greta’s past, when she broke her right foot around the same time her mother died by suicide. Because