My primary passage and some initial notes

I thought it would be nice to share the primary passage I will study for my project and include some of my initial discussion which I will use in my paper.  This is Burden remembering his first night alone with in his convertible back when she was seventeen and he failed to reach across those “thousand miles” of leather cushion to make the first move:

I didn’t know why I didn’t reach over.  I kept assuring myself that I wasn’t timid, wasn’t afraid, I said to myself, hell, she was just a kid, what the hell was I hanging back for, all she could do would be to get sore and I could stop if she got sore.  Hell, I told myself, she wouldn’t get sore anyway, she knew what was up, she knew you didn’t sit alone in parked cars with boys to play checkers in the moonlight, and she had probably been worked over plenty, somebody had probably run the scales on her piano.  Then I assured myself that it wasn’t Adam that I was afraid of.  To hell with Adam, I told myself, did he think he could put lead seals on his sister’s drawers.  Hell, somebody had probably hosed her already. I played with that thought a second, and then all at once I was both hot and angry.  I started up in the seat, a sudden tumult of something in my chest. (AKM 383-84)

The reflexive masochism, the multilayered focalization, Burden’s faltering attempt to act sexually as a man: everything about this passage preeminently integrates into my project.  Still, before we jump into interpretation, we must disentangle the layers of focalization intrinsically inherent to this passage.  First—as I’ve already indicated—we must establish the point of narrating in that the apparent heterodiegetic Burden recreating/remembering this scene isn’t the ultimate heterodiegetic Burden that looks back from the novel’s conclusion.  This Burden is being revisited as he revisits his first romantic encounters with Anne.  Accordingly, the Burden who’s lost in the memory of this parked car liaison lounges on a motel bed in Long Beach.  The ultimate-narrator Burden conjures this past version of himself, who then conjures his college self.  This is a categorically important distinction given that each of these versions of Burden contain various disparate facts and worldviews.  To be clear: the homodiegetic Burden in this scene is a college boy pretending “he’s such a God-damned big man” (AKM 383). The second, remembering Burden, is the recently wounded Burden who’s just discovered that Anne has been sleeping with the Boss.  Interestingly enough, the reader infers that the sensibility, mood, and voice of this passage are imbued by the wounded Burden, not the “redeemed” Burden we meet at the novel’s end, precisely by the fact we haven’t met him yet.