Field Guide to the North American Teenager

Norris’s titular field guide is an ever-present motif throughout the novel, both because the notebook is always on Norris’s person and because Norris’s field guide entries open each chapter. The field guide serves as a motif for the theme of The Influence of Stereotypes on Judgment and, later, The Impact of Words. Norris’s field guide entries begin in Chapter 1, even though he doesn’t receive his notebook until the end of Chapter 2. These entries reflect the judgments that Norris makes about the people and things he encounters in Austin. For example, Norris’s first entry describes Austin as “[g]enerally inhospitable to human life” and speculates about Austin’s “environmental insecurity masked as pride” (1). Norris’s entries continue to be just as scathing as he begins to write about the varying encounters he has with cheerleaders, loners, jocks, and other archetypes at Anderson High.

Norris’s writings include a mixture of his own observations and opinions as well as generalizations and judgments based on tropes he’s witnessed in movies and television. For example, in Maddie’s “The Beta Cheerleader” entry, Norris writes that her hobbies include “[k]issing the asses of those at the top” and that she’ll end up holding the hair of her puking sorority sisters and perpetually a bridesmaid (70).