They felt uneasy around it, challenged, disturbed. I suppose that's what made it art, rather than drawing.
Mike likes to go to a museum to look at one drawing in particular. It's a drawing by an unknown slave showing a cluster of shapes, going from perfect to almost unrecognizable. Mike sees it as a representation of human life, which is a cluster of perfect nonsense. He is not the only one moved by the truth represented in the painting. The meaning of it appears to be familiar to many, taking on a universal form.
And naturally, because I was talking to him in my head, the whole conversation was a monologue, and it was all about me.
The fact that Mike uses the identities of other people in his inner monologues shows a detachment he has, or wants to have, from himself. He uses others to project criticism, encouragement, fear and struggle all connected to himself as a coping mechanism.
I wrote: the name of the world-across the back of my card and set the box in Flower's lap.
This is where the title of the novel comes from and what we can discern from it is the senselessness and complete truth all at once. It is the phrase Mike chooses to write for Flower's secret box. It comes as spontaneous and right thing to write. The simple, yet impactful phrase, which contains universal truth, just like the drawing of an unknown slave, contains the main message of the short novel, which is trying to make sense of a senseless world.
