Everything

"One important Other Thing about the Duffler is his intense, even completely nutso, levels of self-scrutiny: it’s as if he dictated the entirety of auto-scrutor par excellence Ignatius of Loyola’s notoriously fastidious Spiritual Exercises to himself in a brief chat in some under-the-tracks diner somewhere in the heart of Philly’s supposed no-go (or, for the Duff, don’t-go-gently) zones, for our Man is nothing in this novel if not self-conscious in every dimension imaginable—and usually quite guiltily so as well, as if his entire life were this one Platonic Long Day (which it very much is, avec initial caps as in the novel), and that Day’s spiritual forebears were the Jewish family of Annie Hall gathering on some perpetual Day of Atonement not because anyone but themselves has told them to, but because they simly, unavoidably feel unspecified, pervasive, transcendental Guiltand—and so simply are somehow guilty of, well, Everything."