Images

 I felt like o

ne of the big images in the book was Abraham's "movie". His set of frames that, seen individually, seemed to have no difference from one to the next. I related this to the passage of time in the novel; all of this time passes, and much of the time between events is unmentioned, such that it gives the impression that from one moment to the next, it's hard to tell any difference until some major shift happens, so the book skips from one event to the next with little pretense.

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 I felt that the flying man's silver ring was another important image. It seemed to represent a sort of freedom, of stepping beyond one's self and reality and doing things you never thought you could, of being allow

ed to be someone else and forget yourself. After giving his ring to Dylan, the flying man, Aaron, seemed to remember who he was, as if the moments he had the ring on were an unrealistic blur. He wondered where it had gone, but could not remember giving it to Dylan, and so it seemed he forgot himself when he wore it, making it a thing of power but also of danger.

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Also important was the distinction between white and black. In the beginning of the novel, when Dylan was young, it didn't seem to matter. But as he got older, he began to be singled out, and it became more important that he was white. Arthur attempted to escape this by acting black, and in doing so he ended up not going to Stuyvesant, which seemed to have a considerable white student population. Dylan was bullied and picked on by other people, and so he began to hide and cower before others.

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Girls also seem to be important to the novel. Being interested in them is treated as a passage of growing up, something normal and to be embraced. Sex is looked at by the characters as something that feels good and is fun, it seems, but one didn't necessarily even have any experience with it. It was a sort of honor thing, something that made others jealous of you and made them admire you.