Van Wort In Sam Lipsyte's Admiral Of The Swiss Navy

In "Admiral of the Swiss Navy" written by Sam Lipsyte, there is a narrator who is the kind of boy many of us have known at one time in our life. He is confused, arrogant, showy, put in situations where he must decide what the right thing to do is, and always worried about what the other kids think of him. He is attending a summer camp near a lake in Canada and rooms with an unpopular obese kid named Van Wort. Yes, Van Wort, you can only guess that a boy with this name gets besieged by the other camp boys. The narrator finds himself involved in some of these acts of violence towards Van Wort. The narrator then reaches into his conscience and finds himself in a moral quandary, and decides to start helping Van Wort a little at a time, but is too late. Van Wort felt instigated by those who tortured him, to finally end the pain
As the kids at camp play a game at every meal, the loser would have to do the dishes. Obviously, Van Wort always lost. It was one of these meals that the narrator offered to help Van Wort with the dishes, showing his first real morally valued action. After this event the camp boys called the narrator degrading nicknames. The narrator did not want to take either side in this war, but wanted Van Wort to stand up for himself as he hated Van Wort for his weakness, but at the same time, admired that while he would be tortured he would barely even scream or cry. The narrator would never step into help, but would clean Van Wort's wounds for him the morning after. The year after Van Wort's death, the narrator gained weight and got jumped in his town but later lost all that weight and found a group of people that he got along with. An odd action to do, but it was a relief for him to feel what Van Wort went through, as if he was breaking the chains that bound him to the society around him, and finally acting as his morals led him to