Personal Autonomy

The contrasts between the teens and the adults allow the novel to explore ideas of personal autonomy, as characters alternately seek to shed it or acquire more of it. At the beginning of the novel, the adults have arrived at a large rental house to spend time with old friends. They engage in general carelessness and debauchery, seeking to temporarily shed the cares and responsibilities of adult life. Meanwhile, their teenage children choose to distance themselves from the adults, both literally and metaphorically. To help enforce this distance, they play a game in which they attempt to hide their respective parentages: “We didn’t need to reveal why we’d been playing in the first place. It didn’t have to be spoken aloud that our association with them diminished us and compromised our personal integrity” (17). These dynamics set up the respective character arcs throughout...