The Unhappy Teenager

I wondered how he would react to being an unhappy teenager in the so-called real world. The whole novel is a kind of knock turn that takes place over three hours as he makes his way to this pond and has a kind of mystical encounter there. He's sort of a centrifugal absence at the center of the book. It's difficult to get at who he is because he is so cluttered by other people's conception of him. I think if anything that's the most realistic aspect of this book is that we only begin an end in others' ideas of us.