Lozo's Blog

     There's one thing that has been grabbing at my attention since the beginning of Sag Harbor, and I think I should write about it here. It has to do with an aspect of Benji's personality/writing style that kind of shows who he is as a person and his opinions about life.       I'm talking about his extremely complex understanding of society and societal problems. Throughout the book, he makes constant references to small behaviors in people/differences between his culture and others that show this really big analysis that is going on in his head. When he talks about race, for example, he seems like an expert, and can see between the lines when certain things happen. I think it's important to contrast this with Jason Taylor, since they're both pretty close in age but also completely different. Jason doesn't really understand what's going on in life. It takes a big event to teach him about the gravity of the Falkland wars, and he doesn't really know ab...

     I know this is a broad topic, but I thought it was important to address Jason's broad coming of age in this book, and, more specifically, the ways in which we can tell. His behavior changes a lot from the beginning to the end. At the beginning, we can tell that he is uncomfortable, immature and scared to speak up, even when other people are hurting him. However, he goes through many growth experiences throughout the book that open his eyes, the most notable of which being his interactions with Eva. She points out many interesting things to him that he hadn't noticed before, and kind of exposes all of these things that Jason has been keeping locked up inside of himself (like his stammer and the "hairy barbarians").      One of the biggest changes we notice in Jason is the fact that he stops using the word "gay" to describe things, and even sometimes uses words that he would have described as "gay" before (like "beautiful" when he'...