Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
[...] Later in the book of course he talks about "... the upside to new people coming into a community ...", though of course he also writes that "two worlds that didn't understand each other were colliding". [...]
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In that paragraph about new people he says: "But, aged twenty, I could only see what was being lost." This is an explicit message to the reader: I can see it differently now. (The reader gets a similar explanation with regard to the arguments with his father.) There was nothing similar in the opening pages. I wasn't looking for a grovelling apology, just a hint that our narrator was aware of the impropriety of his behaviour as a 13yo. This was the opening of the book - the closest it gets to an introduction - so I think the reader is entitled to a little bit of direction if things are other than they seem.
That the author gives us such direction later and for other things suggests they are not that way in the opening. Everything he does and says through the book seems to try and affirm the "we are different" message in the opening - even, it seemed to me, if he had to turn his head away to make sure he never saw anything that upset his worldview. When he begrudgingly went back to school, he seems to deliberately avoid the company of those that might spoil the picture he had built for himself. He never opens himself to the possibility that there are others out there recognisably the same as he without being connected to the Lake District, and that there are others that are different but whose value does not depend only on what they can contribute to the Late District. I found his perpetual isolationism very wearing.