“Our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible” (Meagan Adler)

    After tonight’s reading, I was particularly intrigued by the matter-of-fact, almost mundanely ordinary approach that the narrator takes in setting the plausible premise that will expose the idea that “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed” (pg.3).  As Finn, the character that, in my opinion, almost seems to resemble the narrator in Camus’s The Stranger, says “‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation’” (pg.18).  As the narrator honestly and straightforwardly reflects upon the past, he fully accepts the idea that his own history is almost a manufactured subjective version of his own truth.  Finn blatantly expresses, “That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us’” (pg.11). I thought that a particularly powerful idea is that in which the narrator relates to the adolescent mind that demonstrates “cleansing scepticism” (pg.8); as the narrator expresses, “we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us” (pg.8).  The adolescent youth want to be something besides a “part of a social backdrop” (pg.16) in which their parents make up; they have a driving ambition and a feeling of invincibility as they challenge socially defined laws and strive to be individuals.  This ambition gradually fades away; as the narrator expresses, “we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives” (pg.10), soon coming to the painful realization that their “release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible” (pg.10).  This part of the novel is analytically compelling, for we are able to see that there will always be the boundaries of that “holding pen” (pg.10), containing us in an infinite universe.  This idea furthermore reminds me of Notes from the Underground and the idea that we need definite answers and boundaries in an infinite universe in order to feel a sense of security and safety. We need a so-called “sense of an ending” (pun intended). Overall, I am intrigued by the ordinariness of the novel and am curious to find out more about the narrator’s almost superficial relationship with Veronica in which “she was just trying to improve” (pg.27) him and his distant relationship with his friend group from high school.