The Brooklyn Follies:
Chapter 1: Overture p.1 to p.3.

Narrator: Nathan Glass.
Place: Brooklyn, New York City.
Overview: Nathan introduces us to his life, family, decisions and projects as well.
Extract Divided into 4 parts:
Part one: Childhood: choice of the place.
Part two: Family, Himself, his wife, and his daughter: on bad terms, very negative part.
Part three: The routine in Brooklyn.
Part four: Project: “writing a book about human foolishness (his and others experiences), memories of the past.
The beginning of the extract is unusual, it sounds like an end. Generally the last chapters that are placed first are called “prefaces”: We sense that the narrator is going to face something new. Probably a new life or things he didn’t expect to happen. From the very beginning, we learn almost everything about Nathan’s life and Family. He is divorced, recovering from lung cancer, and he’s a retired Insurance salesman.
Paragraph 1: This paragraph is very depressing. Nathan has no hope, no beliefs anymore. He considers himself as a “crawling dog” (very low self image).
Paragraph 2: Then follows a transition to his daughter, a very negative one too. She obviously gets on his nerves. He has a bad opinion about his daughter. She’s described as “not stupid”, she is compared to his mother in a negative way: “she speaks in platitudes”, “exhausted phrases”, “hand me down ideas”. In short, he considers his wife as a boring an uninteresting person and his daughter too. He has an argument with his daughter but he obviously doesn’t care about it.
Brooklyn Routine: He has a strong attraction to a waitress named Marina. Apparently, the heart and the love are not dead yet. It contrasts strongly with the first sentence: Someone eager to die would not be attracted to anything. Marina is the starting point of his daily routine in Brooklyn (Cosmic Diner). Another contrast: Someone willing to die or someone hopeless would not have any projects (he plans to write a book).