Who is this person talking to us so casually in the opening sentences of the novel? We don't know his name, how old he is, where he's from. In fact, he dismisses such information as "all that David Copperfield kind of crap," and begins talking about himself reluctantly, as though our need to hear his story is much stronger than his need to tell it.
We don't even know it's a boy talking until he mentions an ad his school runs in "about a thousand magazines" claiming that they turn boys into young men. We won't know his first name until his visit to a teacher at the end of the chapter, and we'll have to wait even longer to find out his last name. No, he isn't going to give us anything as formal as an autobiography. All he wants to do is tell about "this madman stuff" that resulted in some kind of illness, from which he's now recuperating in a place not far from Hollywood, California.
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