What We All Long For

“Anonymity is the big lie of a city. You aren’t anonymous at all. You’re common, really, common like so many pebbles, so many specks of dirt, so many atoms of materiality.” 

The main characters are all present in this scene and are also all anonymous for the time being. However, in the next chapter, they are brought into being. The narrator here is pushing back against the idea that our insignificance is because we don’t exist; we are common, but we do exist, even if we don’t matter to the vast majority of people. It’s a subtle, but important, difference.

“They shared everything: money, clothes, food, ideas. Everything except family details. There was an assumption among them that their families were boring and uninteresting and a general pain, and best kept hidden, and that they couldn’t wait for the end of high school to leave home.”

Their families are not boring, of course, particularly to each other, and as the novel progresses, the suggestion becomes more that they are bothered by their parents and are attempting to forge their own selves in opposition to their parents. To what extent they are successful is yet to be determined.

“Carla knew that she never got the whole truth. For one thing, he was never to blame. So while it was true that the police were motherfuckers, Jamal was also troubled and she knew this, he was her brother.”

Part of the ever-shifting conception of self in the novel is the duality of the self and the duality of circumstances. Jamal, like Quy, is not one thing: he may be messing up, but he is messing up in a world that is designed, and wants, for him to mess up. The novel makes a clear argument that this is difficult to escape, particularly once you are in it. It also argues that this shouldn’t preclude those caught in the mire from getting assistance.