It's Kind Of A Funny Story Analysis

It’s Kind of a Funny Story follows an individual named Craig Gilner, as he navigates the confusing and all-over-the-place period of adolescence. Over the course of our class, I will read the novel and relate Craig’s experiences to my own and to those of general adolescents. For this first reflection, the topic of cognitive foundations certainly sparked my interest, in particular, decision making and the zone of primal development. Adolescents may not make the greatest decisions during this time of their lives and interactions with others often inform particular thoughts or behaviours (LaMarre, 2018). This is why adolescents, like Craig, are so vulnerable.

Craig’s decision making is heavily heuristic, or rooted in emotion (LaMarre, 2018). From the start, we find Craig checking himself into his local hospital because he wants to kill himself and because he is so overwhelmed by his emotions (Vizzini, 2015). In this moment, he is not thinking logically and thus not evaluating the consequences of the act of suicide. Even biking to the hospital during the early hours of the morning begs to question the emotions he was acting on, not what other people would have done should they have been in his position. By the dual processing theory, heuristic and logical decision making are opposite ends of the spectrum with adolescents falling more within the heuristic end of the spectrum and contributing to greater risk taking (Arnett, 2018). An article written by Richard Knox attributes