The titular character of “The Girl with the Blackened Eye” is a woman who is continually haunted by something that happened to her when she was 15 – she was kidnapped by a serial killer, spending several days being captured by him. After being raped and beaten and malnourished for more than a week, she is found after the police find the captor and kill him. Since then, she has been reshaped and changed irrevocably by these events, not really seeing the vividness of normal life, and instead seeing the mundane in the terrible things that were inflicted upon her.
She refers to her kidnapping as being “forcibly abducted” – she thinks that it helps to distance herself from the event. “It was something that could happen to you from the outside, forcibly abducted, like being in a plane crash, or struck by lightning. There wouldn’t be any human agent, almost.” The girl desperately needs to believe that it was not another human being that did this to her – it was just something that happened. This attempt to separate herself from her trauma occurred particularly during the kidnapping itself – she would find a place outside her body, clinging to life as she was being raped with everything she had. By removing herself mentally, she managed to survive, if only somewhat.
She begins to thank heaven for small mercies – in fact, she theorizes that, because she was so unusually young when she was kidnapped, he sympathized with her and could not bring himself to kill her. He needed an audience, and she was going to be it. She witnesses another kidnapping and raping, and she is driven out to where this new red headed girl is killed. She feels powerless to stop these events from unfolding, and perhaps even feels a little guilty for not speaking up when the captor offers her the chance to trade her life for the girl’s, so that she might live.
She continually refers to people’s reactions to what happened to her, as she learned them after the fact. When she was rescued, others would tell her about the bad things that her captor did to other women, but she did not care; in fact, she resented everyone else who deigned to inform her of what he did to women, as she experienced it firsthand. “I was contemptuous of facts for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.”
What happened to her remains in her mind for years afterward, despite the fact that she tries to ignore what happened – “Never say that man’s name. So it’s like it never did happen.” At the same time, she has had difficulty transitioning back into the real world – she feels as though, compared to those eight days when she was kidnapped, raped, fighting for her life, that real life is dull, disconnected. It even gets to the point where she sees the captor as a face in the crowd sometimes – he continues to haunt her. As a result of this horrifying experience, she cannot truly enjoy life, even though she goes through the motions just like everyone else – having kids, starting a family. Being so young when she was defiled so brazenly and horrifically changed her outlook on life, numbing her to what is good in life.
