Significantly, however, Boku is a member of the advertising world, that symbol of media-dominated and consumer-orientated contemporary Japanese culture, which is revealed to be under the thumb of the right-wing leader by virtue of his financial holdings; it is this man who indirectly draws Boku into the maelstrom of the sheep chase and

"But he's not a lump just sitting there. He moves about by his own will, no? Seems mighty strange that something that moves by its own will doesn't have a name."

Boku is by no means a despicable man, out to perpetrate evil. Neither is he coldly indifferent toward those around him - his former wife, his girlfriend, or J the bar owner. He seems genuinely fond of his friend Rat in particular, carrying out with good cheer and curious favors the latter requests. In fact, Rat appears in many ways to be the alter ego of Boku himself - Rat's letters to Boku have the same mannerisms and tone as Boku's speech. Ultimately, however, Boku avoids engagement and commitment, those qualities Sartre deemed to essential in human relations. Short in attention span, he is constitutionally incapable of giving fully of himself to anything. All is surface.

A case in point is his relationship with his former wife. The divorce effectively takes place early on in the novel, in chapter two, when Boku returns to their apartment after attending his old girlfriend's funeral to find his wife ready to move out for the final time. The conversation between the two skirts everything that might be thought of as essential for an understanding of their situation. At one point Boku remarks, "I'm not explaining. I'm just making conversation" - summing up the tenor of their relationship. Boku is dejected over and saddened by the failed marriage; but there is no reflection whatsoever on what might have gone wrong, and the matter is soon erased from his consciousness.

"I don't call it," I said. "It's just there."

The conversation continues with an amusing give-and-take on why some things (like ships) are accorded names whereas others are not (like airplanes). The problem goes unresolved, even as the conversants consider the "act of conscious identification with living things" and "non-interchangeability: as possible bases for naming.

The thinness of Boku's identity is exposed by the absence of self-examination and in his relations with other people. If, as Jean-Paul Sartre claims, true identity is forged in the crucible of the dialectic between self and other, Boku fails the test. The "other" is a problematic force for the subjective "I" or self, because it too, unlike inanimate objects, is endowed with a consciousness and subjectivity that often clash with those of the self. Consciously or unconsciously, Boku tries to escape the self-other confrontation by viewing others as objects, no doubt because his own subjective self is wanting in depth.

" There's sex for self-improvement start to finish and there's sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as thing-better-to-d

Some common words found in the essay are:
Sheep Professor, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beetle I'd, Faith Orchestra, Significantly Boku, , Holmes Nietzsche, Ultimately Boku, Boku Rat's, there's sex, former wife, doesn't name, wife girlfriend, moves own, sheep professor, subjective self, beautiful ears, sex life,
Approximate Word count = 1849
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)