Unrecognizable
Jennifer used to be a man. It seemed that it was a lifetime ago but the truth was that only several years separated his past life from present. Jennifer used to be James. That man looked like a stereotypical college professor. He had been wearing “Dockers and a tweed jacket, a blue Oxford shirt, and a brown tie.” James had “a mop of brownish blown hair and small wire-rim glasses, a fountain pen, stubble.” He had his “desk, computer,” and a nice position at Colby. The imagery is supposed to evoke a feeling of absurdity of life. We can believe that we know everything about other people – judging by their social statuses, professions, ideas, and dreams – but still they can manage to surprise us.
Solemn and silly
Traditional society dictates that men and women behave differently. We are so convinced that we are two opposites that we teach our children to believe that. Jennifer used to be a man, thus she knows that the inner world of a man is as full of emotions as a women’s. Being a woman, the protagonist notices that women and men behave according to certain behavioral patterns. A night before, Jennifer had gone to “the women’s room during the break to find a long, long line.” “While waiting for the stalls,” all the women were “talking to one another, looking at ourselves in the mirror, fluffing up our hair with our fingernails.” It made her “smile,” she thought about “the same scene in a men’s room” where everybody was “deadly silent, not looking at one another, concentrating on the business at hand.” They looked as if they were “standing atop the bridge of a mighty inter-galactic star destroyer.” This imagery evokes both a feeling of mirthfulness and sadness at the same very time.
The School
The Haverford School was a strange place. It was like “going to high school in a Charles Dickens novel.” It was “a decaying haunted house,” with “desks from the 1930s” and a headmaster “from some era earlier than that.” In the corner of “each of our desks was a hole for an inkwell.” James’ classmates of 1976 included Mike Mayock, “who later played for the New York Giants,” and John Dilulio, “who went to on to direct George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative.” And then there was Zero and him, and “another guy.” This imagery helps the reader to learn more about James. In spite of the fact that he is not the least popular guy, James seems to be full of insecurities.
