Turtle All The Way Down Analysis

Words: 507
Pages: 3

Turtles All the Way Down: By John Green At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the northside of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at at particular time -between 12:37 PM and 1:14 PM- by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them. If those forces had given me a different lunch period, or if the stablemates who helped author my fate had chosen a different topic of conversation that September day, I would’ve met a different end- or at least a different middle. But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to. You think, I now choose to go to lunch, when that monotone beep rings from on high …show more content…
And as I sat beneath fluorescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light, I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact were basically identical organisms colonizing a vast and windowless room that smelled of Lysol and lard. I was eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich and drinking a Dr Pepper. To be honest, I find the whole process of masticating plants and animals then shoving them down my esophagus kind of disgusting, so I was trying not to think about the fact that I was eating, which is a form of thinking about it. Across the table from me, Michael Turner was scribbling in a yellow-paper notebook. Our lunch table was like a long running play on Broadway: The cast changed over the years but the roles never did. Mychal was the Artsy One. He was talking with Daisy Ramirez, who’d played the role of my Best and Most Fearless Friend since elementary school, but I couldn’t follow their conversation over the noise of all the