Hal doesn’t know who he is and the idea that someone feels they do is galling and intimately relatable in so far as it would be for someone to peg you as a good samaritan while you knew truly you are not. His Moms Avril hears her echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit lately: he is lonely.”įor me this paragraph epitomized coming of age and the realization that what your parents want for you is not necessarily what you want for yourself, and the loneliness that can comes as a result. “One of his troubles with his moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. On page 696 Hal talks about his loneliness in one of my favorite passages in the book. I think that the book carries more weight if there is no root cause to Hal’s problems. I didn’t like this interpretation because it reduces Hal’s loneliness and sense of loss and anhedonia to a physical meaning (the fungus he ate when he was young) and something that can be cured with drugs. I wanted to post my critique of this ending. A lot of people on this thread have embraced swartz’s interpretation of the ending which i’m going to post here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |