“Figuring out what to say about it all in order to make the books worth reading has brought back a lot of the original ideas that went into it. This is one topic that seems to keep surfacing as I retrace the steps: This game the kids play together, and later, even the narrative itself they exist in, is a hostile, confining medium, which can be viewed as analogous to life.
“Life messes with you,” the cartoonist continues. “It can feel like an antagonistic, nihilistic continuum, broken in ways, actively sabotaging you in others — yet appears to have demands of you, hoops to jump through, comparable to the rules of a sadistic game, or the structure of a stunted narrative.