After the first few pages, I was extremely skeptical, and after the last few pages I felt like I knew Murry intimately and sympathized with/for him. It opens with a tinge of supreme pessimism, overt references to the likes of Cioran, Celine, as well as Faulkner and Steinbeck (in decreasing order of morbid outlooks on life).

I know now that what I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky … I don’t know if I wanted to find death or if I wanted to find life … Living is simply a series of mistakes, after all.

“wherever you go, there you are” … there’s no tyrant like a brain

At first, it consists of a few meandering cynicisms that, by themselves, are wholly insufferable. However, when given life by strokes of Stephen Morton, they're actually not bad pretty good, understandable, and no longer isolated to the delusional dystopian outlook of a sad man. In the same way that Transmetropolitan becomes enjoyable and even humorous.

to be understood is to prostitute oneself… I felt safe and because of it, I felt disturbed

It's still very depressing, doubly so because I don't think any of it (??) is fiction

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late

.

paranoia is nothing more than a commuted death sentence

matures from the platitudinally depressed, Neitzschean reddit commentary on a cold world, and into a confessional of a (still a deadbeat) man with nothing to lose going on an adventure. It’s like the dark foil to Passage to Inis Mór whereby the man becomes healed (or, at least, changed) by indulgence and an orthogonal, near death experience, rather than through the forward path of recovery

related