"He was tough, faithful, brave and completely unreliable; he was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds and had the mentality of a child; over a year ago Father had already begun to say that at any moment now I would outgrow him."
Lucius is talking about Boon Hogganbert, whose complicity in "borrowing" his grandfather's car he will later become in his story-telling. From this we uncover that Boon has contrasting personality traits-he is faithful but unreliable, he is a big grown man but behaves as a child. In some instances, Lucius, as an eleven year old boy, will prove more mature than him.
"There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size."
Lucius finds himself in a difficult situation when Boon pushes him to be his partner in lying. As an eleven year-old boy he struggles with this new notion that he has to make decisions for himself. But it is not only that he has to decide something, it is what he has to decide. He sees it as a crime to betray his grandfather and his mother. He brings about this interesting conclusion about the innocence of childhood-that what makes childhood innocence is not lack of knowledge, but lack of age.
"You have heard--or anyway you will--people talk about evil times or an evil generation. There are no such things. No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the un-virtue of any given moment, any more than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it."
This contrast of virtue and non-virtue is an interesting motif used by Lucius; he is the one who narrates the story. As a young boy he sees virtue through religion, through listening to his parents and non-virtue as opposite to this. Through non-virtue he was "licked" by Boon, Boon persuaded him to lie and manipulate. Even though he is struggling, the curiosity and the sense of adventure, a sense of doing something he's not supposed to do takes a hold of him and he falls to non-virtue.
