This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
Bret Easton Ellis’ “Rules of Attraction,” a book I deeply fixated on during my first two years at Dartmouth, starts and ends in the middle of a sentence. When I first read it during my freshman year, the novel possessed me for reasons that seem both obvious and mildly embarrassing: it’s set at a liberal arts school in New Hampshire, bears an odd resemblance to my early romantic life at Dartmouth and cynically satirizes the college’s vapid, self-interested students, all of which felt far too familiar. As a Bennington College alum who ran parallel to the Ivy League crowds of the 1980s, Ellis even throws in a few irreverent nods to our college on the hill, which I thought were endearing even though they’re mostly insults: “These asshole frat guys from Dartmouth have crashed the party. I have no idea how the fuck they got onto campus. Security must have let them in as a joke.”
After an impulsive re-read during my final week of college, however, I found myself particularly affected by its structure. Through its nonlinear narrative, the use of rotating first-person perspectives and its irregular mid-sentence beginning and end, Ellis precisely captures the frantic, disorienting passage of time in college. The everyday chaos — like how late-night pong spirals into a trip to the river late at night, exam after exam blurs, relationships you thought you’d have forever suddenly end — moments that don’t begin or end with neat punctuation.
I wonder now if the days that will amount to the rest of my life will move differently after graduation, if Hanover operates on an uneven metronome that makes some moments last five minutes and others a thousand years, even though the circumstances of your life here rarely change.
As a senior in my final quarter at Dartmouth, I’ve discovered that small talk with underclassmen quickly veers towards some iteration of one inevitable question: “Does it feel weird to be graduating soon?”
I don’t know how to answer this, mostly because I cannot even conceptualize the end of Dartmouth. I don’t mean that in a “the best moments of my life were spent in the Psi U basement” or “I’m buying a house on Occom and sending my kids here” way. It’s just that when you’re in the cold stacks at 3 a.m. studying for your midterm, grabbing Collis stir fry with someone who’s known you since you had bad bangs and an even worse sense of style or running the same route through Pine Park for the hundredth time, life here seems like it will go on forever. Time doesn’t progress, it loops and collapses in on itself — fall, winter, spring, summer, repeat, repeat, repeat. Until one day, suddenly, you get your diploma.
That illusion of permanence is dangerous. If you don’t recognize that your time here is finite, you stop chasing anything novel; you’ll miss out on things that aren’t right in front of you, beyond your class readings and everyday life. Without knowing the end, there is no urgency to act, and unless someone physically grabs you by the shoulders and screams “This is it!” you’ll never realize that there might not be another opportunity to hike Cardigan, do one (or all) of the seven, or dress up in a ridiculous outfit for Gatsby.
On the other hand, if you lean too hard into the ending, start thinking you’re already halfway out the door, you risk something just as stupid: coasting through your last moments like there’s nothing left for you here. You decide you’ve already met everyone worth knowing, already done everything that matters. But you haven’t, not even close; you’re failing to recognize how much Dartmouth still has to offer you, and how much you can continue to give to Dartmouth.
I can say these things because I’ve done both this year — passively overstayed and completely checked out. Clearly, I recommend neither.
One night last August, while I was living alone on the coast of Rhode Island, I was anxiously thinking about senior year. That solitary summer gave me a lot of time to ruminate about my college experience, and I quickly came to the conclusion there were big things I wanted to change about my life, but I didn’t know if I could or should. In my notebook, I scribbled a stupid, childish line: “I wish I could restart. I want college infinity, university of forever.”
Yeah, I know how pathetic that sounds, especially now that I’m typing it up less than a week before graduation, but it was true — I felt that I had completely botched my one shot at college. Someone I was once close with said that if he met an alum that didn’t instantly rave about their time at Dartmouth, he was certain something was wrong with them. I laughed in response, and even probably agreed, but I was really just hiding the fact that at that moment I definitely didn’t love Dartmouth. There is truly nothing stranger, nothing that feels more transgressive, than being unhappy on Dartmouth’s campus.
Something had to change; luckily for me, it did. The flip side of thinking about college as an endless experience, is that you can always start something new — a friendship that surprises you, an ambitious project, a fling.
An entry from a few days ago written in that same journal reads: “It’s funny how drastically things can change in such a short amount of time, even in the 11th hour.” Maybe that’s even when change matters the most — to prove that though everything hasn’t gone right, you aren’t resigned to discontent. Maybe that’s what I’ve come to love about the beginning and conclusion of Ellis’ novel — the implication that the events within it are just one of many things that have happened to characters, that their lives extend beyond the page. The mid-sentence start and stop provokingly questions: does anything ever really end?
Tess Bowler is a former Mirror editor of The Dartmouth and a member of the Class of 2025.
