Both of this chapter's novels are dedicated to dramatising the profound long-term consequences of experiences that occurred in adolescence. In particular, traumatic experiences such as bereavement are shown to be impossible to overcome, and to have lasting effects that resonate well into adulthood. These novels offer adolescence as a defining moment, but in ways that are never satisfactorily resolved. For these adult protagonists, the failure to come to terms with adolescent experiences has resulted in an adulthood characterised by atrophy, arrested development, and pathology. These conditions in the protagonist are then given a sense of national significance by the ways in which both novels show the individual to be symptomatic of a moribund culture. Both novels are also strongly characterised by their attempts to contextualise their protagonists in terms of an analysis of recent American culture: the paralysis of adolescence is a symptom of a paralysed culture: Moody's Hex is ‘stalled between consonants’, and the narrator of Eugenides' novel is similarly transfixed by adolescent experiences that have traumatised him. Further, both novels seek to locate the origin of this contemporary malaise in a specific historical moment, that is to say, they identify a point in the history of the United States in the late twentieth century at which the contemporary predicament began. It is this cultural and historical analysis that gives these two novels their distinctive value.

Both of these novels are also broadly postmodern in the way that they problematise ideas about knowledge, epistemology, and representation.