I get the sense that you strongly identify with the protagonist; you may be just describing an exaggerated you.
Yes and no. I don't share a lot of the protagonists' qualities but I do share a lot of his criticisms.
I went through a very cynical phase this year, where I wondered why I was spending seven hours a day in school, and why I was spending three to four hours at home on homework. If you include preparing for school in the morning and driving to school (which for me is a 20-30 minute drive), you can consider that seven hours to be eight hours. So all in all school consumed eleven to twelve out of the sixteen hours of my waking life. Factor in dinner, chores, after-school activities, etc., and you get very little free time.
Now this is nothing against intellectuality. Intellectuality resides at the very core of my passions. It all traces back to the retort popularized in
Good Will Hunting: Why are you spending $150-200k on college when you can get a free education at the library? In the case of public schools, it's not money that we're spending but time.
I thought about this question throughout this cynical phase of mine. At first I thought that school was a necessary compromise people must make in society in order to make society function. But this philosophy didn't prove enough to justify how my waking life was completely consumed by school and how much money I would spend on college. Then I looked at the issue differently.
Of course you can get a very good education using libraries and the internet. And this education will most likely be far superior to that of the majority of college kids. However, if you bring that same motivation that it would take to satisfactorily self-educate yourself to a college environment, you will get a much better education. Why? There are some facets of a college education that you can only get at a college, such as expensive equipment and a professor at your disposal -- it takes much longer to get answers to questions raised on forums than answers to questions you've asked a professor. And the same thinking about professors applies to fellow students: you will have more direct access to discussions about your studies. Also, to get into the emotional side of things, at college you will be swamped with human contact, and consequently far less lonely than you would be on the self-education schedule, especially since you won't be sent by your parents to camp over the summer and the like. Furthermore, at college you won't be spending a lot of your weekdays working for a living, during which you cannot advance your studies, but instead you will be spending that time in classes. And life will also prove a bitch to you because you're deviating from the norm (e.g. it will be hard to get a job you like or one that pays a lot) -- not because you're doing something wrong, it's just a decision after all, but because such is life.
Whooo, I'm out of breath now. Anyways, you may notice that I only included college in that whole paragraph; I said nothing about public schools. That's because I don't hold the same opinion for public schools. I don't consider public schools to be intellectually stimulating. Classes get more interesting and challenging in eleventh and twelfth grade, but even then, I don't know of anyone in my grade other than my small group of friends who talks about academics outside class and apart from homework. Furthermore, your parents or the government are mostly managing your finances during public school education, unlike the case in which you decide to pull the maverick move of not going to college, where your parents are likely to kick you out of the house and cut off your financial support. For these reasons I prefer that I had an alternative educational plan through middle school, high school, and perhaps elementary school -- perhaps homeschooling or a private school that would have resonated with me. I had actually requested this of my parents in ninth grade but they wouldn't let me.
Now, instead of being cynical, I am more of a realist, and resign myself to what is and try to get around it =p Although I think I am still, as a good friend contends, fundamentally an idealist.
Also there doesn't seem to be particularly any message, story or catch, but mostly just a description with no conflict to resolve or to leave unresolved.
Yeah, it's a character study, and a satire on school and society. It's definitely not focused on the plot -- the plot is just a device to deliver the criticism -- although I would say that it has some messages. My main character is often unintelligible, which can devalue some of his arguments, which doesn't help in delivering a message. But there are many intelligible arguments that he makes. I also played with style in this short story. It was largely influenced by Salinger. I wrote this during the period in which I reread
Catcher in the Rye and
Franny and Zooey, and read for the first time
Raise High the Roof Beam: Carpenters and
Seymour: An Introduction.After rereading it I think I'm going to edit it and make some minor tweaks, like renaming Mr. Cole to Mr. Coal (fire imagery, e.g. students throwing their papers and work into a furnace), changing the "ya's" to "you" or "yeah" (because it's just plain annoying), and some other things that I'll come up with while editing.
