The Lerner Excerpt: The New Sincerity

The Lerner Excerpt does fit into the Wallace on Aesthetics of The New Sincerity. The Lerner Excerpt fits into this because the author writes his story as a new rebel, someone who is willing to expose himself and lays everything out there and is not afraid of showing his emotions. This story has three major events that prove that Lerner is writing as a new rebel. The three main events are, the observation of a man at the art museum, the narrator's reaction to Isabel’s story and finally, the connection between Isabel and the narrator. In these main events, we notice emotions being exposed as well as melodramatic events that the characters encountered. For instance, in the art museum when narrator observed the man reaction to the paintings. We notice that the narrator started to wonder if this man was actually having an emotional, artistic breakdown or if he was just releasing his emotions about a problem he was facing. At this point of the story the narrator is showing us a gentle and an understandable part of him. The second event was when the narrator zoned out and had a smile on his face, while Isabel was telling her tragic life stories. Throughout, this part of the story the narrator shows a more hipster melodramatic side of a new rebel. Its not that the narrator didn’t care about what Isabel was facing, but the language barrier as well as the drug usage made the narrator incapable of understating what was going on. Finally, the last major …show more content…
We notice that the characters expose little to no emotions. For example, we see Mae one of the main characters from The Circle, hiding her emotions from the people that surround her. This might be because characters from this story don’t have many encounters with one another. They focus more on social networking instead of interacting face to face with each other. It appears that Eggers writing approach is more traditionally like the one of an old