Summary
A turning point arrives in the library, where the narrator watches Sam translate Ovid’s “Iphis and Ianthe” back into Latin while she struggles with her own paperback. Measuring her “paltry dabbling” against his fluent erudition, and burdened by the loans funding her education, she concludes she has “made all the wrong choices.” Rather than retreat, she resolves to take herself seriously. She goes to her shaggy, pillow-adjusting advisor and arranges to stay an extra semester to write an honors thesis in creative writing and take two seminars—one of them Dr. Gastrell’s Immortality seminar.
She learns that Yash is also staying on (he had taken a leave of absence sophomore year to extract his mother from a psychiatric hospital his father had committed her to), and the two are delighted to face what they call, borrowing from “The Last Fall,” their “farewell to youth” together. Sam disapproves sharply, accusing her of racking up debt because she does not want to grow up; she retorts that he, with his free house and free utilities, is in no position to lecture her about adulthood. As the thesis deadline nears, the unflappable Sam unexpectedly cracks—he begins to disprove his own argument about Hume, triples his coffee intake, takes up smoking, and can only sleep when the narrator rubs his head and sings to him. She nurses him through it and then helps him quit smoking with small ribbon-tied bundles that taper him off. At a senior dance, trying to pluck cigarettes from Sam’s pocket, she is knocked hard to the ground in her pale-green dress; Sam’s friend Brent looks down at her with open disgust and offers no hand. She gets up, brushes herself off, and walks the two miles home alone.
Analysis
This unit is the hinge of the novel’s künstlerroman. The narrator’s decision to stay and write—choosing art and further debt over the safe, expected path—is the moment she begins to claim a creative vocation, and she does so against both Sam’s contempt and her own well-founded financial fear. The library scene, in which she feels she and Sam “go to different schools,” shows how easily a gifted working-class student can be made to feel that intellectual life belongs to others; her choice to write anyway is an act of self-authorization that the rest of her life will vindicate.
The shared phrase “farewell to youth,” lifted from Ray Hart’s story, demonstrates one of the book’s key ideas: that literature gives these friends a vocabulary for their own lives, a way of naming experience as they live it. Sam’s breakdown over his thesis humanizes him and reveals his certainties as a brittle defense—he literally begins to refute his own argument—while the narrator’s tender, practical care (the singing, the cigarette bundles) shows the nurturing labor she pours into the men around her. The fall at the dance is the unit’s resonant image: knocked to the ground and looked at with disgust, she is left literally on the floor while the men remain standing—an early, physical rehearsal of the way she will repeatedly be the one who absorbs the damage while others move on.
