Other people have already mentioned the repetition and we talked about it in class as well, so I’m not going to go into that.
What I have been thinking about is the “almost” in the almost total break between David’s (yes, I’m practicing) life before and after the shooting. I’ve been trying to put my finger on a feeling I’ve been having since last class. Looking back at chapters 5-8, I feel as though there are some really strong connections between David before and David after. We talked about the humor. Some other connections I noticed were his sense of being disconnected from both his family and his friends. In the scenes after the shooting, he attributes this sense of disconnection to that experience and to not being able to talk about it, but it already seems to be developing before that. In the scenes of him with his parents on the weekends–his dad buying him toys he can’t play with, his mother taking him to a place where he can’t do anything at all–it seems obvious that there was already a huge gap before he got shot. Similarly, with his friends, trying to hide the fact that his parents are separated creates a disconnect between him and them. There is also his doubt about committing the robberies, doubt which he can’t express at the time, but which mirrors his guilt and puzzlement afterwards. In a way, it seems like everything that he becomes because of the shooting was already there, but he either wasn’t aware of it or couldn’t act on it until afterwards.
