[argonaut]

I thought that the ending actually ruined the essay. It felt like an anomaly, a self-contradiction. His entire life story is one of how it has always been impossible to reprogram who he is, and here he is, at the end, declaring how he's going to "fight the urge to fade," and change himself, trying to change himself into something that is very clearly antithetical to who he is at every level of his personality.