A Fraction of the Whole

In "A Fraction of the Whole," a major theme is insanity. Every single character seems to go crazy, or already be crazy.

The book is basically about a boy named Jasper who has an interesting father. Through a few different ways, he learns of his past. He has no mother, and in the beginning of the book is not aware of what happened to her, other than she died, but lives alone with his philosophy bum dad in Austrailia. In the beginning of the book, classified into one chapter, is Martin, Jasper's dad, telling him about his childhood and his murderer brother. Then Jasper reads Martin's notebook and he learns about the next bit of his life, including Jasper's mother. Life that Jasper can remember would probably be classified as the third chapter. As the book progresses, you almost learn about Jasper through Martin and worry for him: he seems to be following Martin's own path. There are so many parallels between them, and also between other characters (who haven't necessarily appeared in Jasper's life, but have in Martin's) that it's troubling. One of the most prominent of these is insanity.

Martin lives with some sort of philosophical brilliance, but also stupidity. He is aware of his mind and holds the world in contempt, thinking that people who mostly worry about the little things in life are useless. Similarly, Martin is useless-- he only thinks about the big things. In fact, he THINKS about the big things, but doesn't do anything. He's pretty pointless. Not to mention nearly off the edge. He gets sent to a mental hospital and is released, but not before being thoroughly nuts and destroying the strip club he used to manage.

Jasper's mother also has a history of craziness. Right off from the bat, Martin noticed that there was definitely something wrong with her. However, he never broke it off. I think he was just so shocked and excited that a pretty girl had paid him attention (not to mention deflowered him) that he was able to ignore her apparent problems. Anyhoo, Jasper was "the last obstacle" to her suicide. His job was to get born so that she could die. She was pretty insane.

Jasper's family on his mother's side also is crazy, from what you can tell of them, but you don't hear much. On his father's side, they were refugees. His biological grandfather died, his step grandfather became crazy and violent, and his grandmother also went psycho-- poisoning her son for the opportunity to nurse him back to health. His uncle went nuts and began killing people who cheated in sports. He first became a sports mass- murderer, and then went into hiding in Thailand and ran a crime empire, or, as he put it, a "Democratic Cooperation of Crime." Nearly half of the book is devoted to Martin's telling of Jasper's uncle Terry's journey to madness.  The question is: will Jasper have a happy ending or follow the legacy of his family?