Arthur Maxley

Arthur Maxley is the central character/protagonist. Arthur is a listless young man and a college dropout, drifting through life with no sense of connection or purpose. Arthur’s central character trait is the emotional instability he suffers from as a result of witnessing the violent death of his mother when he was a child. The novel functions as an exploration of the way this childhood experience shapes Arthur’s behavior as an adult.

One of Arthur’s key struggles is his inability to connect with other people, in particular his inability to connect with women. This difficulty stems from the emotional instability of his mother who would behave in dramatically different ways towards Arthur when he was a child: sometimes she was kind, engaged, and affectionate, whereas at other times she was cold, aloof, and uncommunicative. As a child, Arthur had no way of understanding why...