Point of View

The novel is narrated from the first person subjective point of view - that is, from the individualized, educated, idiosyncratic perspective of its central character, Andy Palmer (see "Characters"), the point of view of an individual caught between idealized but distant visions of the future and longings for a hollow but familiar past. It is also the result of a lack of any real sense of how he's going to integrate both past and future into a present vaguely fulfilling only because lack of loneliness, said lack resulting from his intense but somehow superficial friendships.

Critics have interpreted the novel's complex, self-absorbed narrative perspective as a distillation of the "Generation X" experience of everyone born in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This has happened for two main reasons, the first being Andy's careful self-identification with the group he describes as "an X generation - purposefully...