The Narrator

The unnamed narrator is the novel's central figure, its protagonist, and is generally regarded as a thinly disguised self-portrait of the author. On another level, however, and as previously discussed, the narrator can also be seen as a distillation, an emblematic representation of homosexual American men coming of sexual, social and political age in the 1950's and 60's. This is, perhaps, the reason why the narrator never reveals his name where there is the sense that he is intended to be perceived as something of an "Every-gay," a simultaneously anonymous and universal representation of an experience of humanity, as opposed to a portrait of a particular human being/character. In other words, the narrator's experiences, the sense of shame associated with those encounters, his determination to cast aside his homosexuality, and his experience of being an outsider defined by sexuality are almost universally common to homosexual men...