During his interactions with Mme Crommelynck earlier on, I thought Jason would've grown much more, but by the end, I still thought that he hadn't fulfilled his coming of age destiny.
Also, I think Jason has been selfish. Granted, he's a 13-year-old boy, but this is a coming-of-age story; shouldn't he have learned more about matters of the heart? Shouldn't he have improved somehow? It seems to me that something more could have gotten better for Jason. By the end, he seems to know how to handle his bullies better, but that doesn't mean that they have stopped bullying him. His stammer? It's the same as it was in the beginning of the book.
Perhaps I'm being overly critical of the poor boy, but I find him to be intelligent, but awfully lazy when it comes to self-improvement and self-exploration. By the end of the novel, I feel that Jason is just a bit less naïf than he was in the beginning—that's about all the improvement we see from him.
As an aside, we still don't know if he's crazy or not! I will follow up with another post after I've pondered the novel a bit more (and after I've calmed down from being angry at Jason).
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