Old School

“How did they command such deference—English teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing.”

The narrator is coming of age and wants to better understand his relationship with the surrounding world. For him, achieving this understanding is more likely through the written exploration of human experience than the rigorous application of scientific method.

“Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have doomed the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own.”

Later in the novel, when the narrator plagiarizes the short story, he doesn’t seem to be fully aware of his wrongdoing. This passage foreshadows his lack of awareness by making clear that he sees all work, to some extent, as collaboration.

“The scene with Gershon could be spun into a certain kind of story. The new boy comes to clear things up with the cranky handyman he’s unwittingly affronted and ends up confiding his own Jewish blood, whereupon the handyman melts and a friendship ensues. In time the man who has lost his sons becomes a true father to the boy, enfolding him in the tradition his own false father has denied him. And what irony; the ambitious, upward-striving boy must descend to a basement room to learn the wisdom not being taught in the snob factory upstairs.”

Here, the narrator considers his situation’s viability as a story premise. This calls into question his reliability as the novel’s narrator. The narrator might be telling the novel’s story in a way that prioritizes captivation over accuracy. This also hints at a larger question in the book: Can a story be told with objective truth?