to escape this oppression is the artist's way:
The boy treasured anything discarded. He . . . lived an entirely secret intellectual life. . . . In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect. . . . He was alert not only to discarded materials but to unexpected events and coincidences.
. . . Grandfather . . . would . . . tell the boy stories . . . of people who became animals or trees or statues. . . . Grandfather's stories proposed to him that forms of life were volatile and that everything
. . . could as easily be something else (132-133).
In other words, life offers to the individual with the artist's consciousness a means of freedom from the oppression which in this novel seems to be the essential medium in which Americans lived in the era portrayed. Almost everyone wants power, money, sex, etc., but the artist wants what the majority do not even notice, or what th
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