/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19763468]

>first twenty pages is about an autistic guy spilling spaghetti at a college admissions interview followed by a guy getting neurotic over his weed habit

Why did people like this?

[Anonymous No.19763480]

>>19763468
Because they do not take individual chapters out of context like they are short stories and actually read the book so they get the required context.

[Anonymous No.19763486]

It's the second 20 pages where it really starts getting interesting.

[Anonymous No.19763504]

>>19763486
Honestly I didn't start to really like it until 200 pages in, and the last 100 or so pages have the most emotional impact. It's not a favorite but I can understand why people like it so much.

[Anonymous No.19763506]

>>19763486
>It's like eating candy for the soul.

JESUS CRINGING CHRIST.

[Anonymous No.19763527]

>>19763486
>It gets good 50 paragraphs in

[Anonymous No.19763923]

>>19763468
>Why did people like this?

This is always a midwit take.

[Anonymous No.19764041]

One of the interesting things about the first chapter is that we actually do not know how accurate it is, the narrator has become completely unreliable. As the novel progresses the narrator falls deeper and deeper into the characters, he gets confused between his own thoughts and theirs. this is primarily shown through free indirect speech, which is absent from the early chapters and slowly increases as the novel continues but also shown through the narrator correcting himself, after thoughts to clear up ambiguity, and the increasing loss of details/observations. By the end the narrator is almost exclusively relaying internal monologue and the bulk of the observations made are through that characters eyes, not his own, he is ceasing to speak. This also has the side effect of turning him into a very unreliable narrator because his narration becomes more and more dependent upon the characters perception. In the first chapter the narrator has completely fallen to reporting the characters inner monologue and he shares all the same flaws in perception as Hal, we can not actually know what happens in the meeting and it could just be a creation of Hal's mind, he could just be stoned and day dreaming to entertain himself; we know Hal has lost all interest/ability in the academic and that he can still play high level tennis/his ability to play high level tennis has a correlation to his pot use and we also have the correlation to Gately's own sporting/academic career. There is a hell of a lot suggested by that first chapter.

[Anonymous No.19764105]

>>19763468
Seems interesting. I'll start reading it as soon as I finish what I'm reading. Thanks.

[Anonymous No.19764115]

the first chapter is actually the end of the book. hal took psychedelic drugs[/spoiler[

[Anonymous No.19764122]

>>19764041
Some more.
This also calls into question The Wraith, Hal and Gately ever meeting and digging up Himself's head. We have no concrete evidence for any of these, just the narrators word who has become unreliable by the time the elements are introduced. The closest we have to proof of any of it is that Himself sates that he has implanted the entertainment in his head, but he (Himself) is very drunk and unreliable at that point (Professional Conversationalist chapter).

[Anοnymous No.19765014]

>>19763468
for me, its Good Ole Neon

[Anonymous No.19765035]

>>19763506
Yes. What is this?

[Anonymous No.19765061]

>>19763468
The first scene you read (Hal spilling spaghetti) is actually the end of the book

[Anonymous No.19765069]

>>19763468
Hal was such a prick. He deserved becoming a retard after betraying his bro Pemulis.

[Anonymous No.19765071]

>>19765014
Good Old Neon resonated strongly

[Anonymous No.19765154]

>>19765069
>betraying his bro Pemulis.
He didn't. Pemulis got to cocky and blackmailed Avril, shot himself in the foot.

[Anonymous No.19765181]

>>19765154
But Pemulis never used that against Hal. Hal betrayed him because it got into his mind that Pemulis was a liar and couldn't be trusted. But in the first chapter it's implied Hal traveled with John to find the entertainment, and John was by far a bigger liar than Pemulis. Hal got punished for betraying his bro Pemulis and trusting some canadian scum who was fucking his mom dressed as his brother.

[Anonymous No.19765236]

>>19765181
Hal never used that Pemulis was a liar against him, he just told Mario that it scared him. This was actually to show how far gone Hal was, mentally speaking, he was not even able to see that Pemulis' lie was just for show, there is no way it would have worked. Pemulis also kind of fucked over Hal first with the whole blackmail thing, Hal did not care if Avril was fucking JW and he is probably the one who told Pemulis about it.

There is no evidence that JW is a liar, he does not say a single word in the entire book.

[Anonymous No.19765246]

>>19765236
I read it a long time ago, but wasn't it heavily implied that John was a canadian spy infiltrated in the academy to get into about the entertainment?

[Anonymous No.19765340]

>>19765246
Nah, you have at least a half dozen people you can make a solid case for and there are two spies. JW is the most difficult to make the case for of the possible suspects, all we have is the graveyard scene and everything we know about him suggests he has no interest in such things.

Thematically speaking JW is there to show what it takes to make it in the show, he is a "grim machine" who never speaks and has little interest in anything but tennis, he is what Hal becomes. It also makes more sense that the graveyard scene did not actually happen, see my two spoiled posts above, accepting the graveyard scene makes the narrators decline incomplete, it does not follow the proper arc which id outlined through Gately and all the characters follow.