One thing i love about the Raven Cycle that i feel is not spoken much about is its take on grief. I know this comes up a lot more in the dreamers trilogy but it’s done so intentionally in TRC.
We know both Ronan and Noah were different before but we never really see it. The Death has already happened before we (Blue) arrive at the scene. Niall Lynch is gone and Ronan is forever changed. We can hear about the before, his hair, tennis, his relationship with Declan, even see glimpses of it, the Barnes, Sunday’s a church, but Ronan will never be the person he was before and we as an audience will never meet him.
For Noah it’s even clearer. We never know Czerny outside of brief recounts years after the fact from a man justifying his murder. His family don’t get the chance to speak to us and the Noah we know is in his own words lesser than the Noah Czerny that was lost. Noah Czerny is split, one half the lesser ghost of Noah and another the distorted memory of Czerny.
Both of these introductions of loss are so interesting, especially Noah’s, because they force the audience to equally lose access to parts of the character. We are immersed in the story, in Ronan’s case in the manner of Blue who meets him at the same instance we do. Noah’s loss is more interesting because the main group don’t experience his loss, they forget him and move on. His family grieve him outside of the narrative scope and Whelk doesn’t seem to grieve him at all. Instead the audience attempts to mourn him, putting the pieces together. I think the absence of everything we never got to know about Noah is such a perfect representation of death and how it can make our loved ones seem strangers to us. We didn’t know all of Noah Czerny, but we know there was a boy who died when he didn’t deserve to and isn’t that enough for us to grieve?
