Sam sez " wasn't really thinking, at the end, "what an asshole." i wasn't thinking "go cowboy," by any means, but i was thinking he was horribly misguided, or way off track, and just wrong on so many levels that it was mind-blowing, yet i'd been more or less sympathizing with him right up along,"

But I'm thinking the root difficulty is that we're not thinking of him at all, we're paying attention to this literary text with various qualities (certain voice, certain cultural and personal attitudes, certain positioning of a "main character," questions of accuracy of Africa depiction, percentage of fantasy, percentage of wish-fulfillment, etc., insertion of "major dramatic action" there at the end). In short, are we too aware of the artifice to experience anything but the artifice?