The Past

Over the course of the novel, the author uses Neil's relationship with Anita, his interest in historical studies, and his guilt over Shruti's death to explore the ways in which the past might threaten to entrap the individual. Neil begins to feel the tight grip of the past on his sense of self in the latter half of Part One. In Chapter 5, Neil casts into the future, infusing his narration of the present with retrospective wisdom. Before describing an online chat with Anita, Neil says: "I found the conversation in adulthood, archived in my old email...It is like one of those artifacts of history I studied later as a graduate student—the thing the people experiencing it missed, the thing that might have changed the rest. When we handle such artifacts, we condescend about how ignorant the denizens of the past are. But we...