It's Kind of a Funny Story. (1-151)

Summary: It's Kind of a Funny Story so far has introduced a couple of main characters. The novel first starts off with Craig,the main character, who right off the bat tells us that he is struggling with depression. With no hesitation he stated " Its hard to talk when you want to kill yourself" (Vizzini 1). Craig in the beginning of the novel seems very troubled and helpless. He has a small Circle of friends that he likes to smoke with as way to relieve stress but as the novel goes on he reminisces about how he used to be and how his depression wasn't so apparent. Craig was very studious and had a small social life. He wanted to get into one of the top schools in New York called Executive Pre-Professional High School. In order to do so he studied extremely hard for a whole year, he had stopped hanging out with friends and focused more on the exam. He eventually finds out that he does get into the school and celebrates with one of his new friends Aaron. From what i had saw in the Novel, Aaron was one of the main reasons why Craig started smoking in the first place, although it was a stress reliever you can also see how it was affecting him. He is also having problems with adjusting to his best friend going out with the girl of his dreams; constantly talking about how much they have fun together isn't the easiest way for Craig to deal with their relationship. Overall, there's a lot going through his mind and he is trying to figure it out one step at a time, with the help of his friends and their "way" of relieving stress, Craig is somemwhat convinced that he is getting better, but has his doubts from time to time. His friends don't notice much, but Aaron does see small changes in Craig's life and questions his meaning of happiness. He was ecstatic about getting into the High School of his dreams, but had a difficult time adapting to the new school. While talking to the doctor at the clinic, Craig explains that some of his suicidal thoughts come from the stress at school. He feels that he cannot even compete because everyone is smarter than he is and that is what has been bringing him down. While there he also talks about the support from his sister, he says that his little sister is always there and how she "Cares" and wants him to get better. However, when talking about his parents he's more down about them and says that they didn't waste any of their time and that it was just a chemical imbalance. How they would sign all the forms given to them in order to get him better, but it seems that they're not really focusing on whats wrong with him altogether. It seems as if they're looking at his condition as a cold or a fever and by giving him a bunch of medicine he will get better in an instant. Which I think is a key factor in Craig's depression.

Quote: " I thought...you haven't really lived until you've contemplated suicide. I thought like it would be good to have a reset switch like on the video games, to start again and see if you could go a different way." (Vizzini 102)

Reaction: This quote is very true and i was somewhat surprised that I was able to see exactly what he was talking about because i pictured it in a different way. From my view Craig is saying that you've never really lived until you face your fears and are suddenly not afraid anymore. In this case Craig, i believe is afraid to kill himself, but wants to know what it feels like, but the only problem is once you do it there's no turning back. Which is why he looked at and wanted life to be like a video game where you can just press restart and start the game all over again with a whole new plan. For me, i think that everyone feels that way from time to time, especially when they make a huge mistake, they just want to start over and forget about everything and avoid the mistakes that they made the first time.