lly David that is mainly concerned with being lost again, not Aunt Bertha. Aunt Bertha appears to us to have diverged her attention from the couple to the exhibits at the museum, whereas David’s attention is always on the two people that he is following, not once at the exhibits in the museum. It is David that tugs on Aunt Bertha’s dress to warn her that their subjects might be walking too fast for them to follow anymore.Perhaps this panic is due to David’s effort to get directions to his destination. In Passage 1, David asks the gentleman for directions to Bodder Street. In Passage 2, David asks the man in front of the museum whether or not this is actually the museum. David is never seen in these two passages as a bold, spirited leader; he is always seen as a follower. This has significant implications; David can never lead in this country, he can only follow. He does not posses the free spirited, Columbus-conquering mentality. David is very passive and out of place in both of these passages. He follows people’s advice in Passage 1 and in Passage 2, never his own intuition. David represents the immigrant who will forever be lost in his new country. What is ironic is that David’s inquiries about getting the “right” directions fails in both cases because of his inability to manipulate language in such a way as to fit in. This unfortunate difficulty has produced in David a learned helplessness mindset and a paradox: he is lost if he does not ask for help and he is just as equally lost if he does ask for help.The differences between Passage 1 and 2 also illustrate the importance of language with respect to the motif of being lost. In Passage 1, David is geographically lost suggesting his inability to belong somewhere on a map. This is also seen throughout the entire book and characterized by the Schearl’s movement out of Brownsville to another neighborhood. In Passage 2, Davi...
