Summary

The day after they break up, the main emotion Nate feels is guilt. But this is not a surprise, since Nate has “had a long and intimate relationship with guilt” (204) over everything from his privileged status as a white middle class man to the break up with Hannah. He feels guilty for looking at that other woman and just the way he behaved in general. The epiphany he has at this point reaches a new height: “Only now had it seemed to him that he’d been in some kind of fugue state the whole time, going back and forth from one mood to the other, without ever stopping to consider what was driving the insane back-and-forth.

He reaches deep insight in that “now he wondered if he had, at some point, stacked the deck against her—decided he didn’t want her and...