Being Henry David

“Somebody else might have given up, just walked away and bought himself another damn book. But somebody else didn’t just appear out of nowhere in a train station with no ID or luggage. No memory, not even a name. Just a book. A book that might carry a clue, like maybe the name of its owner (me) scrawled inside the front cover. Or a receipt from a hometown grocery store stuffed between its pages. Or a ticket home. I have to know, have to get that book back.”

Danny Henderson’s memory loss is the novel’s inciting event. Because he can’t remember anything about himself or his past, he feels an intense connection with his copy of Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. Danny’s desire to protect the book foreshadows how he will come to rely upon Walden to rediscover himself.

“I’m nothing like you, I want to tell him, taking in his filthy clothes and the dark smudges under his eyes from dirt or lack of sleep. But what if I am a runaway, and things were so terrible where I came from, I blocked them from my memory? My fingers seek out that sore spot on my head under my hair, with its dried blood and goose-egg lump. What happened to me?”

Danny’s search for identity is complicated by his absence of memory. Danny is 17 years old and therefore already at an important point in his coming-of-age journey. However, without a sense of his past, Danny doesn’t know who he has been and therefore who he’s allowed to be in the future. This is why he fears connecting with Jack and identifying with him.

“And there’s a black beast inside me that doesn’t want me to know stuff. It guards my memory, clawing at my insides and going for my throat if I get too close. So why did the beast wake up when Jack said, maybe you killed somebody? Is that what it won’t let me remember?”

Danny’s buried trauma distorts his self-perception and his behavior throughout the novel. His trauma takes the form of a dark creature inside of him. This internal force frightens Danny, because if he confronts it, he’ll have to confront the mistakes he made in the past. Leaving his trauma unresolved, however, threatens to define his character for the foreseeable future.