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Sometimes the first persons in novels are the onlookers, instead of the leading characters. They are like reporters, gathering lots of information, then writing a story. They are just narrators. What they try to tell us is where we should focus on.

That is what I learned that form ‘In the Country of Last Things’ and ‘Leviathan’.

‘In the Country of Last Things’ takes the form of Anna Blume's letter to home. She come to the city in order to find her big brother. However, the key point was not if she found her brother or not, but how horrible and hopeless the city was. That gives us a chance to re-think whether the city we live in is as terrible and hopeless as the one in ‘In the Country of Last Things’.

As for ‘Leviathan’ is the other example. I do not care the life and the marriage of Peter (the first person in this book), but I care about his friend, Sachs.

Sachs was a writer with talent. He also had his viewpoint of responsibility of human beings. After a serial of catastrophes, he recognized he should do something more important than writing books (In my opinion, writing is only his interest. He does not care about that very much). He wanted to arouse the consciousness of Americans. The way he achieved his mission was not to write articles, but, more radically, to explode the models of the Statue of Liberty in different states.

And finally he blew himself up! I think that is not an accident. He meant to do it. Maybe he was desperate of living in such a dirty country. Maybe he wanted to be the last Statue of Liberty in his plan of exploding.