Is Ben's character development really that serious?

In class we discussed the idea of “self-invention” and grandiose character growth over the span of maybe 3 months, sometimes not even. The truth is, I’m a big proponent of "Yeah, that seems plausible.” Mr. Mitchell made the comparison to "March vs. Jan" or something like that, but there are years where I’m really different in March compared to January. Yeah, I do agree that Benji/Ben probably feels a lot more different than he really is, but he has gone through lots of transformative experiences. 

Number 1. He's gotten a job, which we spent almost a class period discussing the implications of. Among those, it's the responsibility of having to show up on time with the right uniform and do the job correctly. Although it's not a crazy task even then. There’s room to argue that what he’s doing is essentially easier than the spring semester he just left. Also clearly he and Reggie aren’t responsible with their own house (maggot pot ew yuck), except the occasional time they lock-in out of fear their parents will show up. Also, you can’t really argue he showed lots of initiative with getting the job because he just asked NP. Anyway, he does use the money for personal subsistence (TV dinners but still lol), which is pretty close to taking care of oneself and being independent. It's one step up from what he did last summer, for sure. 

Number 2. Drinking lots of beer? I’m not really sure this one counts, but as far as growing up partially meaning trying and doing stuff your age group isn’t supposed to do, I think it does. He makes no mention of beer-drinking activities last summer, at least. Maybe he started during school, but now he's less supervised and more responsible for how to get it. 

Number 3. The guns… Yeah, he really learned his lesson there. Sometimes becoming more mature just means being really irresponsible and learning from it. That summer left him with a very physical piece of evidence of all the new crazy experiences he’s had and all the lessons that came with them.

Number 4. He made it into Bayside. He successfully convinced the gatekeeper that he belonged in there too, unlike how NP went about it. He didn’t even need to use his “I paid for this ticket line” and just got waved through. 

Number 5. Melanie. This one feels self-explanatory. He went from never before having kissed anyone to second base. He also really wanted that to happen, and it even sparked a lot of musing over how many girls he wants to (and realistically can) make out with during the next school year (even if he implies he doesn’t get as much play as he wants).

Number 6. Thinking that he’s a new man. To some degree, even the act of believing he’s changed makes him changed. He’s already thinking about going to school wearing banned combat boots to show the ladies he’s the man. He wants to change his style and his reputation (not too different from wanting to be called Ben at the beginning of the summer, but change is change). 

Number 6. Reflection on nostalgia, the merits of Sag Harbor, and the pros and cons of staying close to his family. A huge theme in the book and most of our discussions was about Benji's/Ben's nostalgia and about how future Ben writing the book is very distant from Sag Harbor. I think over the course of this summer he progresses towards some kind of closure on Sag and his family. The conversation he has with his older sister outside the restaurant really reveals how his mind is starting to churn about what his life might look like once he truly leaves the nest. Lastly, when his uncle rode in the car with him, he mentioned that true evil was his uncle being ostracized and hated by his father. This is a reflection of the realization of how evil the abuse in his own household is and how much he wants to get away from that evil in the future. Also maybe, one could see breaking into his aunt/family house and reminiscing is giving him closure on all the “good” times with his family. Another caveat of that is that he does explicitly say that, those “good time” either never happened (fake memory) or were worse in reality. He’s starting to digress his childhood in different ways, and that in-and-of itself is a symbol of him changing and growing up (and might be the strongest one in the whole novel).


Commentaires

  1. Mitchell21 mai 2026 à 12:14

    Wow, this blog post manages to cover basically the entire arc of the novel in a pretty succinct fashion, so kudos on that. And you do make a good case for the idea that "some stuff happened" over the course of this summer (as Benji puts it near the end), and that this stuff DOES represent some significant transformative development. I would add to your comment about his new skepticism toward nostalgia the key role played by Elena's brief cameo in the novel: she advises him NOT to look back but instead to "get out," look to the future, go to a good college, and find his "tribe." She doesn't even stop by the family house when she comes to Sag now, which is a sobering contrast to poor Uncle Nelson stuck outside his father's home. And, with his combat-boots plan, he seems to be following in that exact direction--think of this as further "progress" toward the kid with the dirty Chucks and the Bauhaus t-shirt. It's not the kind of fashion that would go over well in Sag Harbor. He's starting to be more independent of that world.

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