Dupler has published numerous essays and has taught college English. In this essay, Dupler analyzes the destructive rift between an adolescent young man and the adult society around him.

A picaresque novel differs from a conventional novel in that the picaresque form usually revolves around a main character who travels loosely from scene to scene, encountering other characters and situations in a random fashion, gathering whatever seeds of wisdom that present themselves. The conventional novel, on the other hand, typically involves characters whose actions and conflicts form a plot, which leads to some sort of resolution in the end. Miguel de Cervantes's (1547-1616) Don Quixote was the original picaresque novel, from which a long tradition of storytelling has evolved. Don Quixote was a knight whose travels have been viewed by critics as a spiritual quest, a journey undertaken for self-knowledge. The main character in The Basketball Diaries...