Sag Harbor

Benji starts the summer with the desire to be known as “Ben,” signaling the shift in his identity from childhood to adulthood. By the end of the summer, he has only convinced one person to call him Ben. Still, Benji insists that he has learned something, even if nothing dramatic happened to change him as in a typical coming-of-age, or “bildungsroman,” novel. In fact, the novel is resistant to the idea that character is formed by extraordinary events; the summer of 1985 at Azurest is notable for its lack of drama. The days sprawl out in typical summer beach fashion with the boys sitting around brainstorming ways to spend their days before the final countdown to Labor Day that will bring an end to their idylls.

Yet, Benji is ever attuned to the smallest degree of change, so even if nothing monumental happens that summer, at the end of the book he is still optimistic that the upcoming school year will include great changes, including his new name of Ben. As evidence for this possibility, he points to the incremental changes from the summer:

I was definitely more together than I was at the start of the summer.