Howie

On the whole, I really enjoyed The Mezzanine. It was a very unique and fun-to-read book, and it provided a lot of interesting little insights into what was everyday life at that point. Its footnotes were also very enjoyable and a highlight of the book. One of the parts of the book that I loved, though, was one that wasn't clearly prominent: Howie's personality. 

Howie was actually one of the more interesting characters I've read about recently, and that's in large part due to the way that he's presented to the reader. In most books, characters will be more clearly defined; we learn about their names (it's pretty easy to miss the fact that the narrator's name is Howie, as it's mentioned in passing twice over the course of the entire book), interests, and histories either from the author or from other characters, and we can see their personalities from decisions that they make in important moments in the plot. Without any real character-defining decisions in the shoe-lace buying plot of The Mezzanine, and with the strange writing and formatting style of the book, we can't really learn about Howie in a "traditional" way, and thus sort of have to pick up what we can about his personality from random thoughts and and memories that pop up in response to whatever he's doing at the time. We aren't told specific details about his life because Baker is trying to write to represent what Howie would really be thinking, not just for the ease of the reader, and that's what we get; we never learn what he does for a living because he isn't thinking about it, he's just thinking about the actual physical work he has to do there, which seems just like generic office work.

What we can learn from this about Howie is that he's actually kind of a strange person. Observing the things in everyday in detail is actually something that pretty much everyone does without talking about, but Howie does it to a pretty extreme level. He's just constantly thinking about what's around him, wondering how things work, thinking of stories about his past experiences with something, and going into a lot of detail about it. People when they're going about their day are generally at least a little bit tuned out, and just take some things for granted instead of investigating everything as Howie does. I thought the disparity between Howie's outward appearance and his inner life was great; on the surface he's just a normal part of society who's gone through life like he's supposed to and gotten a normal job, but from his thoughts we can see that he's actually oddly disassociative when thinking about society; it's like he's taken a step back from the things that seem routine to most people and sort of looks on them in wonder, thinking about how amazing it is that these things exist and that people take them for granted and always wondering how things work. Things don't seem to come easily to Howie in a way, and he seems to really value having an understanding of how things work and how to work them (this is shown very clearly by how he in large part measures his life through little "advances" like applying deodorant under his shirt). And, of course, he could normally take more things for granted and it just happens that this is a day where he looks really closely at the world, but it seems, from his character and from the chart of thoughts at the end (which was an amazing tool to characterize someone), that this is sort of what Howie is like every day; constantly dissecting things and thinking about life, that each event in his life is its own Mezzanine.