November 19, 1959 [The 400 Blows]

The boy Antoine in The 400 Blows is left to his own aimless, half-formed desires by parents who are almost children themselves, a fun-loving, petulant stepfather and a mother long weary of motherhood. This abandonment isn't deliberate or even entirely conscious, but it allows him to enter a life of careless, minor crime—more important, a miniature underworld without adults as an anti-Romantic Huck Finn whose Mississippi is the vicissitudes of city life without a direction home. And while Huck had the force of the river—and of Jim's fatherly quest—to mark his way, Antoine flees indiscriminately, wandering through a nervous, gray, and ultimately unconcerned city until he too arrives at water's edge; for him, though, the horizon is merely an unresolved shape in the distance, his childhood slipping beneath the surface.

He wanted something more—but can not speak it or see it, an almost absurdist journey-quest away from nothing in particular and toward the same. He is like that Anglo-Saxon Wanderer who begins "sorry-hearted," and "must for a long time row along the waterways, the ice-cold sea, tread the paths of exile. Events always go as they must!" And Antoine also stands on the beach, his gaze, anxious yet blank, boring into the end of his childhood. Barely a teenager, his foot had slid, and the abyss into which he calls does not call back.