The Spirit of Senior Skip Day

I'm about to divulge you all in some discussion about teenage poserhood, let me take a second to reflect. Whoa, final Mitchell blog post! It's been a good run dudes. As a man who has had the fortune of 4 straight Mitchell semesters, the books and discussion are always top notch, guaranteed. I mean, I'm pretty sure all the juniors here have already signed up for classes, but for those with the Mitch in their futures, expect greatness.

Now interrupting this Mitchell ad for some Blog Content! So this Friday, I was reminded of a Sag Harbor dynamic from my activities in real life. Namely, Senior Skip Day brought back the feelings of teen-identity-lameness so beautifully evoked in sections of Sag. 

One theme of Benji's coming-of-age story is exploring the very mockable teenage transition years, where these pre-adults try to pick up older-seeming qualities in an effort to seem cool, and in general take themselves a bit too seriously in the process. Whitehead is constantly undermining his former self and buddies, whether it be their fretting over black vs. white sections of the beach, embarrassing hijinks with BB guns, or an ambiguously harmful hair touching incident from a racially-ambiguous man. Adolescence has plenty of Catch-22's, and these all encapsulate one of them. While trying to structure one's self before prior to adult life, there will be many lame moments of cluelessness and poserhood that only get worse to remember the older you get.

In Benji's lame encounters, they often hinge on adolescence's patented ambiguities. Is this division of the beach a palpable racial phenomenon or am I making such a mountain of a mole hill that my ancestors roll in their graves? Is playing with BB guns actually cool activity/grim foreshadowing, or just a pathetic accident? Was that hair-touching incident something I should be mad about, or just plain weirdness? Essentially, as your identity solidifies, there are unavoidable moments of utter triviality that you have to endure along the way.

Though this isn't a perfect analogy, Uni's latest Senior Skip Day is a pretty good example of teenage triviality. Us cool Seniors band together to SLACK and DEFY the UNI ADMINISTRATION in a BOLD MOVE where we SKIP ALL OF OUR CLASSES! Take that suckers! Pay no mind to the fact that we'll be OUT OF SCHOOL IN 4 MORE DAYS ANYWAY, and are JUST MAKING IT DIFFICULT on some of our TEACHERS on the HOME STRETCH so that we can SAY THAT WE DID IT, while HALF OF THE CLASS actually has to BE THERE ANYWAY!

But if you don't do it, you miss out on quality time with your buds, while all the teachers probably think you're a loser with no friends! That's certainly what skippers told me! Even complaining about it feels grimy, like uselessly skipping a few periods of school suddenly gives me a crucial moral dilemma. Obviously, the consequences of my misdeeds have jeopardized my chances at the Student of the-Kolodziej-Wilhelm-ScienceMatics Tobin Director's Q. Chicken Award! What have I done!

Anyway you look at it, its all pretty lame.

I hope those two separate examples of teenage lameness made sense next to each other. They definitely gave me a similar feeling. I felt like a Benji trying to decide what to do on Senior Skip Day. He'd fit pretty well as a Uni kid honestly.

The Voices of Adolescence

This is a pretty underrated niche of Black Swan Green. Underrated is an overrated word, but I'll use it anyway here. "Maggot, Unborn Twin, and Hangman just aren't getting the respect they deserve!", a literature-focused iteration of a basketball radio host screams into the mic. "They do all the little plays THAT MAKE THIS BOOK A LEGITIMATE CONTENDER!" Like any reputable basketball talking-head, I'm using some exaggeration there, but they're a really cool layer of Jason Taylor's story that really sells this book as one firmly positioned in adolescence. Because the more I thought about it, the more I realized my own early teenage years were driven by subconscious forces that manifested as something close to internal voices. Like we can with Jason, I think identifying the intricacies of each voice helps to diagnose the most powerful social forces in the teenage mind. 

So what can we tell from the characterization of Jason's internal figures? Of all three, Hangman is the most clear-cut representation of Jason's real-life occurrences. As Jason tells, Hangman settled into his mind after playing his signature game in Miss Throckmorton's class. When asked to complete the obvious "NIGH-ING--E" written on the blackboard, it "kaboomed in [his] skull but it just wouldn't come out." (26). His stammering is a medical condition (perhaps coaxed by social forces to keep cool and remain unnoticed) that manifests in his mind with "pike lips, broken nose, rhino cheeks, red eyes 'cause he never sleeps (...) snaky fingers that sneak inside my tongue and squeeze my windpipe so nothing'll work." (26). Freaky stuff. Hangman is in a crowd of his own, since it doesn't necessarily have a voice. Instead, it is far more visibly effective than either Maggot or Unborn Twin, and where they stand on Jason's shoulders and motivate his actions, Hangman silently grabs him by the throat.

Maggot and Unborn Twin are even more interesting than the Hangman phenomenon. They're two often conflicting voices that aren't your typical angel-and-devil-on-the-shoulder type of duo. Maggot is the "nervy" one, always trying to maintain a Jason that is as low-profile as possible. This means constant internal derision to keep him in check. Unborn Twin is the rowdier one with a twisted sense of humor, always thinking of the most dangerous and exciting option in any situation. Since Maggot completely contradicts Unborn Twin's suggestions, it "can't stand Maggot." (18). While skating on a frozen lake, Jason notices another kid skating at the same speed, right across from him. In signature displays, Maggot urges for Jason to "go home", but Unborn Twin asks "What if he's a ghost?" (18). In many situations throughout BSG, the two voices spar in Jason's head, with one typically winning out and directing his course of action. As for their origins, the "Maggot" chapter of the book makes it clear that its namesake has come from peers constantly putting Jason down, until their criticisms sunk into his brain and hung around as a voice. After all, Ross Wilcox and his gang's favorite name for Jason is "maggot". Maggot is fearful and self-conscious, representing the paranoia of teenage existence in which any mess-up can mean days, weeks, months, or years of mockery. Unborn Twin never has its own section, but they seem to fill the confidence gap that Maggot creates. Always daring Jason to do the unthinkable, and bringing thoughts that Jason will never speak to anyone. Like when it's revealed Debby Crombie is going to have Tom Yew's baby after he dies, Unborn Twin narrates that they've "never heard anything so hilarious." Jason finds it not at all funny, but there it is being said in his head. Maggot and Unborn Twin both arose from the powerful social pressures he faces. Together, Hangman, Maggot, and Unborn Twin influence (if not outright control) Jason's behavior in nearly every situation he encounters. 

How about me though *wink*? Well, I definitely don't have the godlike recollection skills that Jason appears to, since he started writing in November and filled in all the chapters or something. Maybe he kept a diary. Those details in the earlier chapters got preeetty minute. The voices I can recall are a lot lamer but hear me out. For a while, the loudest voice was what I'll call "Karma". Whenever I did something that my parents or authority figures or the Bible said was wrong, I'd think that life would slap me in the face right afterwards. Every time I ever did something I perceived as "bad" (even if it was just eating some junk food or staying up late) I'd be watching out for an unseen negative consequence that might not even pertain to what I just did. Like of course your actions have consequences, but I was paranoid that a bat would fly into my mouth or I'd slip and break something after I snuck a Twinkie under my pillow. What does that say about me? Like Jason, I "give a toss", but in slightly weirder ways. Under the surface, I'm a huge worrywart, and Karma stemmed from the strong set of good and bad things that I was prescribed in my childhood. Like Jason, it exploded around 6th grade, in this case when I actually learned what Karma was. For a stretch of 2 or 3 years, Karma would tug on my nerves every time I indulged in something "morally unsavory."

I'd love to hear if any of you have any internal figures you can recall and put to words.

Marilynne Robinson and the Elements of Transience

Shout-out to Housekeeping. It was a good run, Ruthie and company. One of the most obvious assets it’s got going for it is the ridiculous literary attention-to-detail.  Like I said in my LAST blog post, every sentence is freakin’ loaded with intriguing descriptive language and, in my opinion, serious symbolic imagery (Ooh!). I’ll admit, I feel like a broken record on the symbolism thing. In my past three Mitchell classes, I’ve written like two or three short essays on “symbology”, if I may. That’s not a word but I didn’t wanna use symbolism twice. Specifically, I think Marilynne Robinson focuses on the elements of nature as symbols of transience. Crazy, right? Time to lay it out for ya!

As some of you can probably guess from my preface, water is a huge part of this elemental symbolism. Let’s think about water for a second. No matter what you toss into it, what you slap it with, or how much you perturb the surface, the ripples will eventually cease, and the body of water will return to stasis as if nothing ever happened. Robinson caught on to a perfect device to communicate transience! We have two of the most monumental events in Fingerbone history—Helen’s suicide and the train disappearance—both of which are shrouded in factual dispute and disguised by the transient nature of the lake. Since when investigations are underway, the ripples have disappeared, and “[b]y evening the lake there had sealed itself over.” (9). All those lives and stories gone with a weasel-ploop. There’s a ton more water stuff in this book, which is fair considering it’s probably the most apt elemental symbol of transience one could find. That’s not to say I don’t have more though!

Another very common elemental example of transience is the air and wind. News flash, wind moves stuff around and makes it go places, often in random directional fashion. Going “wherever the wind takes you” is a common phrase for living out a transient ideology of wandering. Therefore, Robinson throws it in there an inordinate amount to drive her point home. One awesome excerpt involves air conjuring up the leaves, and directly relates to Ruth’s perception of life.

“Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, (…) the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.” (108)

It's a beautiful image; leaves being picked up by the wind, floundering as if to shape a figure or eventful dance, then just dropping to the side of a structure as the wind blows away. In a transient view, human life equates to leaves catching a drift and riding it out aimlessly for just a moment before ceasing. Pretty bleak I guess, definitely doesn’t make you feel too special. Hey! All you dead leaves! You’re just riding a drift for a few moments on the winds of time! There’s also mentions of Ruth and Sylvie’s clothes billowing out from the wind as if they’re about to be carried off, and Sylvie does open all the doors to expose their house to the elements, but especially air as a solvent. All are great uses of wind as a transience device.

The final of the major elements I noticed in Housekeeping would be fire. It has a brilliantly brief spotlight towards the end, and wraps up a transience-trilogy of interfering natural occurrences quite nicely. Fire burns stuff, and when stuff burns it goes away. Stuff often holds value and significance, things like memories are kept in stuff. So when it burns, especially in this non-digitalized world that the Housekeeping family lives in, all of its significance can go with it. As Ruth would probably say, such is life! Importance is forgotten in time! All things are insignificant! “The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted [!!!!]” (288). Sorry, there’s actually a period there. At least I bracketed the emphasis exclamations. EITHER WAY, what do Sylvie and Ruth do with fire? They burn lots of stuff inside their house, then eventually try to burn the whole dang thing down! Gosh darn transients, always stamping on all the fleeting permanence we have in life!! But wow, how blatantly symbolic can you get? The whole idea of Housekeeping going up in flames? All the cherished family memories that are sanctified in the maintenance of said house? All gone to the wind (and the flames) (and the water).

To close this off, here’s a little snippet that I think ties this all together. Here’s a brief passage Ruth uses to describe the ghostly state of affairs for Sylvie:

“She had haunted the orchard out of preference, but she could walk into the lake without ripple or displacement and sail up the air as invisibly as heat.” (307)

WOW, isn’t that everything I just talked about? Holy smokes! Sylvie, as the pure transient, doesn’t even RIPPLE the water when she walks into it, and can disappear at an instant like a smokeless trail of heat. How uneventful can you get? I think I’ll leave it at that. There’s the evidence you need to see that Robinson is employing these elemental minions to do her transience-preaching bidding. They do a darn good job after all. 

In Defense of Morbid Humor

Housekeeping, in the short glimpse we've gotten, has been a very nice surprise at the end of my strange school-week. Personal note here, but in the stupor of painkillers taken while trying to heal my spasmodic lower back, the wonderful prose and unique storytelling of Ruth have caught my eye. Even while barely conscious, I've been able to wring stuff out of Housekeeping's narrative, partially since the whole re-read-sentences-or-else-you-miss-a-bunch-of-stuff style is how I read books anyway. My eyes go a little too fast, so I'm right at home with Robinson's loaded passages.

The two anecdotes our class-time has dedicated itself to are the couple of "weirdly funny" scenes involving Edmund Foster, train-wrecked grandfather of Ruth, and Helen, who drives Bernice's Ford and herself off the side of a cliff to her doom. Like we've discussed, these two events in their plain and literal significance are no laughing matters. A massive train-wreck kills hundreds. A mother commits suicide. Totally horrible. But through the detailed yet emotionally detached accounts of these events by Ruth, they are riddled with an unusual and slightly uncomfortable humor. It mostly boils down to the vivid mental imagery Ruth conjures. After a few boys help her car out of the mud, the pleasant and polite Helen is then pictured "swerving and sliding across the meadow until she sailed off the edge of the cliff" (33). Though the actual context is quite sad, thinking of this mild-mannered woman spontaneously donut-ing to her death is darkly humorous. Then of course the train-wreck scene is rendered with a sense of weird, jarring passivity. What is a massive, crunching, spectacular loss of life is compared to a "weasel sliding off a rock" after "nos[ing] over toward the lake" (5). Gut reactions can be sort of like "Jeez! Isn't that your grandpa and dozens or hundreds of other people dying? And all you can think of is a weasel going *ploop* into the water?" I hear these pleas and agree something about Ruth's depictions is quite off-putting. But I'll argue for her as someone with a merely enhanced appreciation for the art of humor at inappropriate, often morbid occasions.

At least in the case of Edmund, Ruth has never encountered this man in her life. She isn't supposed to have many emotional ties to the guy. Much like me in the case of my great-great grandfather, Horatio Clayton Simmons. I swear, every detail I hear about this dude's life makes me laugh even harder. First of all, what kind of name is Horatio Clayton Simmons? That is legitimately hilarious. I couldn't think of a more obscure pasty name if I tried. Anyhow, this strange ancestor had 10 kids before dying at sea at age 50. You can call me twisted or whatever, but when I learned this detail, that Horatio Clayton Simmons, who made furnaces for a living, somehow got lost at sea and was never found again, I actually chuckled. How many random details can you fit into one life? However many it is, HC Simmons came pretty close to it. With all the insider knowledge Ruth has somehow attained, I wouldn't be too surprised if she could find an account of Horatio's last days. It was probably just as morbidly funny as her other stories are. Okay, maybe you had to be there. What is ACTUALLY really funny is my basketball coach's closing speech we had after our last game of the season. We got totally smoked, and so coach had to rally us up one last time and talk about how he's excited for the future of the team and all that. But when he goes into the details about how he and his buddies "worked in the cornfields for hours and then broke into the gym to go play basketball", me and two other players started quietly laughing. "What's funny?" he asked. Well what was funny was the mental image of these little southern Illinois boys being bored of corn or whatever and BREAKING INTO a basketball gym in the middle of nowhere, that's what! It was supposed to be inspirational, but the perfect cheesiness of it all just got to us. Sorry coach.

The point of all this is that humor often comes from the unexpected. There are actually theories that comedy comes from situations being different from what they're supposed to be. It might seem vague at first, but the idea of irony and incongruity driving humor makes a lot of sense to me at least. In the contexts mentioned, with a train plopping into the lake like a weasel, or a suicidal woman politely eating strawberries on the front of her car, or my direct ancestor being named Horatio Clayton Simmons and doing lots of strange things, when told correctly, they are all funny despite the morbid inhibitions. So in defense of Ruth, it's quite possible that this humor comes easier to her, and that she was never totally emotionally attached to the subject matter. Neither of her examples were in her control after all. From a child-care perspective, one might even be happy to see she's coped with the deaths of her ancestors with no visible psychological impact. Though I will give it to critics of this quality, it is still a little unsettling.

Esther's Pretty Cool Honestly

Okay. I'm gonna pull an English class trope. "I like this narrator even better than the last one!" says student, not yet triple-digit pages into the book. "They're just different!". But I'm serious this time! Here's why:

There are a few things that make Esther more immediately relatable than the occasionally frustrating and inexplicable Holden. Like many Uni students elementary and middle school experiences, including my own, she is able to "game" education, but for her she still gets straight A's in college. I mean the Class Dean "knew perfectly well [Esther] would get a straight A again in the chemistry course", so she uses this time to work on her English craft instead (Plath, 35-36). Some might say this is lame of her to do, but Esther is the only one in her class who can ace the material even though she HATES it, so it's sort of a deserved courtesy to excuse her from the academic duties. This gives her some credibility over Holden (to me at least) since she tries AND massively succeeds in a school setting, but still has gripes about parts of her education. I couldn't help but get kind of skeptical of Holden's world-weariness when he admits that he barely ever tries but is still totally disillusioned with education. Like could you exert yourself and then make your conclusions? Perhaps a bit unfair on my part, since Holden has some personal issues and all, but this is about my personal feelings towards Esther in relation to Holden, so put it in the pros column for Ms. Greenwood over here. Her ability backs up her criticisms.

Also, though this might be bogus of me, Esther's mental situation is simply easier to understand and deal with from a real-life standpoint than Holden's. Don't get me wrong, both are going through stages of serious depression, but the picture for Esther seems more lifelike and believable (tough self-questioning, extreme loneliness, "moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo") than Holden's does (Plath, 3). Though I really hate to bash Caufield for this, his own existential depression seems absolutely unsolvable. Like head-bashingly frustrating. To be completely transience-phobic is somewhat understandable from the grief of losing Allie and Jane, but it's sooooo hard to imagine anyone ever talking through it with him, or helping him in any substantial way. Even Phoebe calls him out super hard, telling him that "[y]ou don't like anything that's happening" (Salinger, 187). Not to say Holden's emotions are any less "real" than Esther's or anything like that, but Esther's is easier to understand, and when one comes to grips with either of their mental makeups, her's generates more sympathy for me at least. The fact that she knows and articulates that she's "supposed to be having the time of [her] life" contains a self-awareness that is critical in my own acquainting with Esther (Plath, 2). It's still quite early in the book, but the personal dislocation she's experiencing seems more dire than Holden's did at the same point (Doreen scene especially so, and right off the bat) and with the fact of her problems being simply more tangible, Esther's literary manifestation of depression garners more immediate emotional connection.

Unlike Holden for the bulk of his own novel, there's a few things Esther really does enjoy and wants to do with her life. Again, these qualities help to form a more believable protagonist that I can get behind. She's clearly a talented and fairly dedicated writer, considering her English major and winning of essay contests. She has a pretty good sense of humor, even if it's at the expense of others, and isn't quite as mean-spirited with her caricatures as Holden can be. Then there's the funny yet subtly important stuff, like how she REALLY likes hot baths, and is a serious New England foodie. Esther says she "love[s] food more than just about anything else" and that she can't think of many things "a hot bath can't cure", so these seem to be intimate personal details despite some conversational hyperbole (Plath, 24, 19). It's honestly startling and refreshing to have a protagonist who enjoys certain aspects of life so early in the book, and isn't always criticizing nearly everything and everyone. To clarify yet again, I don't necessarily believe Esther is a more entertaining or inherently better narrator character, but that she is simply more of a real person, and for coming-of-age novels, I think that's extremely valuable from a reader sympathy standpoint.

So yeah, Holden can come across as a lame-o with his stream of mean remarks, and his own mental state can seem more like a cosmic affliction rather than Esther's lifelike portrayal of depression. It's tough to articulate, since depression definitely can seem like an impossible circumstance, where even those in the best of situations can have it. But for the scope of each novel, The Bell Jar has done a better job in showing the finer nuances of its protagonist's mental state, and (in my opinion) builds likability with Esther more effectively.

Catcher in the Rye's Fictional Influence

As we've discussed in class, The Catcher in the Rye was an immensely popular book nearly from its publish date. Honestly, this fact seems evident from just reading the text; the more we dig into J.D Salinger's novel, the more frequently certain well-known young adult novel tropes seem to pop up. Seriously though, I've been getting killer fiction-deja vu in some of these sections, when the narrator's accessible first-person narrative drifts into familiar territory. Let me highlight a couple of these for you!

Like Mr. Mitchell, I had literally no preconceptions of what this book would be like. For some reason I thought it was a Mark Twain piece about a farm boy, or at least that was the image in my head. Thanks to that, the (in my opinion) oft-imitated introduction really struck me with how recognizable it sounded. For one, the narrator starting off in a far-off place, looking back at his version of the events is a resonant trope in tons of fiction, especially stuff with a funny intruding narrator or noir films (you're probably wondering how I got here). But in this case, we aren't yet privy to his location or end situation, except that it involves "madman stuff that happened to [Holden] last Christmas", and that he is currently "out here" to "take it easy". The "if you really want to hear about it" as the opening line solidifies the narrator as possibly sarcastic, confessional, world-weary with the events that have happened to him, and certainly 4th wall breaking, which is for sure a popular narrative style today (3). Holden also shows his quite common sentiment of being weary for phoniness, as he expresses with disdain for his now Hollywood-working "hot-shot" brother, who used to be WAY cooler when he just wrote weird stories for his own amusement. I don't think I'm alone here in saying that lots of angsty narrators are PO'd for this exact reason in their respective novels.

Let's get a little further into Caufield's ideology, specifically how it relates to his relationships with other people. The Jane plot thread, featuring a remarkably quirky love interest whose beauty and value only he sees including  a mean drunkard guardian and a moronic jock pursuing her is, well, often present in these sorts of YA-appealing novels and films. Like many other aspects, I wouldn't be too surprised if tCitR popularized the trope itself. This whole kings-in-the-back-row spiel is an extremely apt example of this, establishing some kind of memorable trait that distinguishes the narrator's worldview and search for true, non-phony beauty in things. You can carry that over to the enchanting anecdotes of his seemingly perfect siblings Allie and Phoebe, with their poetic baseball gloves and startling maturity. Especially with Allie and Jane, they each make their own rules in the "game of life" that Holden so strongly objects to, and his loss of both of them seems to lead into his mental instability. Each story is extremely cute though, and the format of using a character quirk to create a semi-superficial, idealized projection of that person is a commonly used aspect in narrative fiction, plays, and films. I think it echoes how the human mind makes associations under the influence of love, where the best or most memorable aspects kind of speak for the person's value as a whole, if that makes any sense at all. Those sections are easily the most touching we've had thus far, and it's easy to imagine lots of future writers imitating that style to effectively convey the emotions they feel.

There's my brief analysis on the two shockingly familiar aspects I've picked up on so far. Maybe I'm in some kind of post-Dedalus afterburn, but this is one of the most accessible books I've ever read. That in itself seems to be a movement of the present day in fiction, where authors make YA novels increasingly slangy and easy in the vocab and narrative voice department to wholly immerse readers into the coming-of-age story. It's a trapping of the genre as a whole for sure, and I feel like Catcher has something to do with it!!

Cringy Little Dedalus

Much of the humor, and hatred, that our Coming-of-Age Novel class has expressed in reaction to APOTAAAYM (a-pot-aaaame? ap-ot-ay-yem?) centers around newly teenage Stephen Dedalus and his many pretentious, arrogant, and self-centered internal thoughts. Readers are granted open access to the downright cringeworthy supply of his musings and tangents, which when combined with Joyce's ironic presentation heap upon us the second-hand embarrassment of seeing someone think such self-elevating, "lone wolf" ideologies at the painfully unrealized point of pre-pubescence. Readers react with anything from a sharp cringe, pity, or straight vitriol at Dedalus' brooding in Part II, and though these moments strike some as disconnecting from the protagonist, there is a calculated sympathy going on here. The cringe-factor we experience from Stephen's thoughts and actions is directly from their painful familiarity; his embarrassing perspectives were once ours. Though we might not have written love poems about a failed attempt at affection, or thought we were the only ones in the entire world who've ever had a sexual urge, Stephen's themes of peer detachment, secretive arrogance, over-dramatization, and know-it-all-that-knows-very-little demeanor are common mindsets of early pubescence (and dare I say even more common for us Uni kids!). It's a large part of what I think makes this book so incredibly smart and well-suited as a bildungsroman, with Joyce being able to pinpoint these exact feelings one goes through in teenage-transition phase, and still have the examples hold up over a century later. I'll admit, analyzing the brain's inner-workings at such a universally uninformed part of one's life is pretty unfair, but it's important to the novel so we should laugh anyway!

Stephen's unfortunately relatable naivete and passiveness really come to light in Part II's "romance" sections and reflections. From the tip-off of the chapter it's revealed that lil' Dedalus has a fantasy bound in fiction going on, where he places himself as the protagonist of The Count of Monte Cristo who will come upon a lovely Mercedes (romantic interest) and lose his "weakness and timidity and inexperience" all in one fell swoop. This is what he concerns himself with, since "the noise of the children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play." (67). I could let that hang there and be fine, but c'mon!! We get it Stephen, you're not a child anymore and you want everyone to know it, or at least all of us inhabiting your mind from the future right now!! The only thing more pretentious than Stephen Dedalus: Playtime's Over is ME at that same age! Why have you brought this upon us Joyce? I thought I was finally over those 6th-Subbie Ethan, instead just cringing at my thoughts from last year and the year before! But NO, you have to drag me along with this little brat who so painfully mirrors the darkest and lamest times of my conscience. Alright, where was I? Right, lame romance. So of course ole' Steve-O talks (thinks) all this big, smooth romantic hubbub, but what does he do, given the opportunity for his magical dreams on the tram with his crush? He shuffles around the steps for the entire time, doesn't utter a word, and though he "could easily catch hold of her when she comes up to my step", nothing goes down and he tears up his tram ticket in the classic early-puberty inaction sadness (73). But that's not all! To really elevate our strange and begrudging mix of sympathy and pissed-off-ness, Stephen writes a poem to celebrate his fantastic wooing accomplishments, where he conveniently forgets the whole part where he didn't kiss the girl he likes. This is all really mean, but do you see what I'm getting at? This particular period of Stephen's life, and all of our lives, is captured perfectly with Joyce's vignette/free-indirect discourse style, and it garners some true sympathy for our annoying miniature artist.

This is a pretty sparse sample of the timeless relatability Joyce is able to convey in his novel, but that doesn't keep it from being effective. We are still being very unfair here, as poor pre-teen Stephen never asked to get cross-examined quite like this, but it's all for a purpose here. To varying degrees, we've all "been there", and can remember our romantic obliviousness or high thinking of ourselves or whatever else from the 11-13 age range, and with every cringe I believe we grow closer to our bumbling EveryTween Stephen. Thus far, these sections of Part II have stood out for me personally, in sheer resonance with myself and as a setup for Stephen's future issues and eventual coming-of-age when his naive assumptions eventually break down.