Candy blog entry number 1

For this blog entry I decided to analyze the intro of the book, because it sparked a lot of questions for me. I also thought it was written differently compared to other books.
"It's hard to imagine life before Candy. Sometimes I sit here for hours, staring into the past, trying to remember what is was like, but I never seem to get very far. I just can't see myself without her. About the best I can manage is the last half hour before we met, the last few moments of my pre-Candy existence, when I was still just a boy... just a boy on a train, a boy with a lump, a boy in a starry black hat.
I was innocent then.
Just a boy.
On a train.
With a lump.
And a hat.
That was all the world I needed to know." (pg. 1)
This introduction is where I stopped reading last night, because I decided that ti would be an interesting entry, to have some of my pre-reading thoughts.
Some automatic pondering were:
Why is it so hard to imagine life before Candy?
Who is Candy?
Who's the narrator?
Did Candy cause the narrator to lose his innocence?
Why does he have a lump?
How did the narrator meet Candy?
Some things that stuck out to me were:
Repetition is used to make us see what the the author wants us to see.
For example, the author writes how the speaker is simply a boy, many times within this short passage. The fact that he is on a train is repeated, so is the fact that he is wearing a hat, and that he has a lump.
Another thing is that the author listed to obvious, and oddly enough, I found myself with a pretty clear image of the scene where the boy is on the bus.
Something else that I noticed was how this quote seems to be bringing us back into the past, and it seems to be setting us up for the story to be told to us.
The tone of the quotation is very matter -of- fact, and almost blunt. It seems simple, although the style could completely change after the actual story of Candy is being told to us. Because, again, this seems to be leading us into the "flashback".