It's Kind of a Funny Story (Bethanie Clopton)

Title of Book: It's Kind of a Funny Story
Author: Ned Vizzini
# of Pages: 444
Star Rating: ☆☆☆☆
 Why This Book has Value:

In Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story, a teenage boy named Craig lives in Brooklyn, New York, suffering from severe depression. After getting accepted into one of Manhattan’s most erudite high schools, Executive Pre-Professional, Craig starts to feel incapable and like he’s never enough. He feels the need to cut off his life so intensely that one night he actually plans to do it. Before he can do anything though, he finds one of his mother’s books about losing a loved one, and that leads to him calling a suicide hotline. Craig spends a whole night admitting himself into a mental psychiatric institute that's a part of his local hospital. He plans for this to make him better, but doesn't really expect the people or atmosphere that he gets himself into. This story is filled with remarkable humor, while still ironically all being narrated by the same depressed teenager. It is about the journey Craig takes himself for five days through other people, anchors, tentacles, art, mental illnesses, and maybe even a little bit of love.

I believe that the importance of this book is the revelations that most people struggle to care about the less admirable people in our society. There are so many quotes that could be taken right out of the book that go along the lines of “I’m a nobody” (136), or “I’m not gifted” (96) that express how the main character Craig feels upon being in high school for a few weeks. Of course, these may just be normal universal teenage thoughts that everyone must go through at least once in their life, but for Craig the thoughts seem to get worse. An important thing that people in the world should notice is when someone crosses that line from normal to drastic. For Craig, a huge part of him taking so long to make his decision to end his life was because there were too many other people doing the same thing, and all for what he thought were better reasons. “I didn’t want to be part of some trend,” Craig says on page 119, “I wasn’t doing this for a fashion statement.” This quote stands out so much because it points out the fact that, because suicide has been happening so much in the twenty first century, it’s become sort of like a normal thing. According to the Huffington Post, there are more suicide rates in New York City than murders (Mathias).  Instead of people becoming more aware and worried about it, they become more used to it. This young adult novel should be seen as important because it gives an imposing perspective on what the mind of a patient, let alone teenager, with mental illness.

A very critical aspect of the book, It’s Kind of a Funny Story and what makes it so influential is the setting. The setting is of course in New York City, in a Brooklyn neighborhood, specifically. This plays a great role in the meaning of the book, because it is about a teenager who primarily feels so isolated from the world, while living in a place that’s always filled with people. This makes the point of Craig’s situation even worse, since none of the so many people understand him or really know how his mind works. This is also an isolationist quality of New York because at one point he plans to take a bike ride on a bridge at nearly three in the morning, but he’s not even worried about anyone noticing him, therefore he says, “I’ll have to pass by the cops stationed at the bridge entrance, but they won’t even look at me twice.” (138) A great takeaway from these facts are that you can see and comprehend the idea that the worst personal isolation for someone with a mental illness, or otherwise, would be in a city.

A likely comparison to this book would be with another novel from an earlier time called The Catcher in the Rye. These two fictional stories are very relatable because they are obviously set in the same areas, but they also deal with the problems of adolescent behaviors. In the story by J.D. Salinger, a boy fails out of his private school, and runs away from his problems for a few days. But in Ned Vizzini’s story, a boy is just worried about failing his classes, and never really takes actions to run away, but he thinks about it more than the average person might. I think that people could look at more of the contrast of teenagers using drugs and alcohol, because both books come into contact with those situations. It is very probable that so many teens could relate to stories like these, just because they have encountered some of these thoughts or conditions. It is crucial that kids in school should be taught about mental illnesses, drugs, and substances because so many teens don’t even know that they have an illness or something they need to seek help with. This is why when they read about fictional characters with stories or thoughts similar to their own, they might be able to seek help for themselves or at least look into the possibilities that roam their mind.

By reading a novel about a teenager who is going through the process of dealing with his own mental illness, it is easy to take a lot of ideas and images from the characters of what it’s like being in a psychiatric institute, and how some people feel about them. It is also a great look into what it’s like for someone to have a mental illness like depression. There are so many different characters in the book that develop different thoughts and actions throughout the story. All of the characters basically tie together to help each other improve and motivate themselves, without really knowing it. With all this being said, a substantial lesson in the book is that it is important for you to accept help. For many people it is difficult to ask for help or to even take it, but with this book it is easy to see that the main character could not have developed as he did without the help of the other people, characters, around him. I think that there is also a great message within the book about not giving up, and not just that, but a message that there’s no such thing as normal, and it’s okay to be different, but there is such thing as a right way of feeling and a wrong way of feeling. And if someone feels bad enough to want to do damage to themselves, then they’re not feeling like they’re supposed to be.

Now it may seem fairly unreliable or unimportant for a fictional book make such an impact or have such value in the world as it is fiction; but notwithstanding, the author of this novel seemed to have significant influences in writing as he had spent the same amount of time in his own adult psychiatric in Brooklyn when he was a teenager. There are so many comparisons to the fictional main character and the real life author, it’s uncanny. The author wrote this book in just under a month, starting a week after he was released from the hospital. I think that this fact gives a great realization of an actual person being so impacted by the events in his life that certain moments and thoughts gave him the ideas for this piece of literature. One good quote that might reflect this is, “Oh my gosh, it hits. I’m in the mental ward.” (181) At one point during the author’s arrival at his own institution destination, he must have had the surreal awareness that he was actually in the hospital, trying to get better, but also surrounded by a bunch of other so called “crazy people” trying to get better. It would only likely register for him the truth about the “crazy people,” and that each and every one of them had stories, feelings, and reasons. It should not have to be that someone has to be admitted into a “mental ward” themselves to truly understand the thoughts, notions, or reasons of those whose ways of life we do not understand.

Therefore, this novel It’s Kind of a Funny Story gives us the chance to know and start to care about the world’s less admirable and overlooked people. So that is why this is such an important book, for especially coming of age teenagers, to read. It’s very interesting to actually have a great perspective of what a depressed teenager looks like, because most teens would never share something that’s so close to them. This novel shares so much truth about those kinds of people, the other people they are surrounded with, and the way they really think. This story even gives a little bit in relation of how parents of at least depressed students should act and react about their child having a mental illness, and what precautions they should take. When more people read this book, they gain the understanding of how to treat different people fairly and with respect, and if more people could apprehend this, there would likely be more of a worldwide acceptable reaction to every person with a mental instability.

Mathias, Christopher. "New York City Suicide Rate Will Likely Top Murder Rate For 2012." The

Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 20 Dec. 2012. Web. 20 May 2015.