: Re: Are these fictional musings convincing or overwrought? I've been working for some time on a story about a detective who finds himself alienated, delusional and hopeless while trapped inside a

@Cooney417

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I will lead off by saying that I like the passage as written, but I feel it conveys a very different character from the one you describe that you want. The character you have written, as I see it, first comes across as arrogant and pompous as he describes the uninspired, defeated losers he is watching, and then hints that he might have experienced something that could reveal his nicer qualities once he began to really face his own mortality. The end of the passage makes me feel hopeful, not despairing.
If you truly want to convey a character that is alienated and hopeless, then you need to completely rewrite this paragraph. An alienated person does not observe other people's behavior and identify with it; that leads to a sense of connection and fraternity. Even if it is anonymous camaraderie, we can all lift a pint with strangers in a bar. An alienated person takes all that common feeling and turns it inward and believes that it isolates him from the world.
Also, I am confused about the hopeless desperation. "Life then came to find me" sounds hopeful to me, at least upon a first reading. It reminds me of Dar William's lyric "I think life chose me after all." I don't think this is what you are trying to say at all. I think you want something like "Life caught up with me," which would be a more clichéd way of saying "Then I got old." But because I stumbled over the message of the sentence, I missed the thrust of the emotion behind it.
Here is my suggested revision:

I turned on the faucet and let the water run until it steamed, hoping to erase the face in the bathroom mirror. An unshaven shell of a man met my eyes with an unarticulated sigh of defeat, resigned to an aged future that was far from the heroic dreams of burgeoning virility. I shook my head scornfully before I laid the razor to jaw. This pathetic reflection had woefully overestimated his ability to succeed. He had languished, frittering away the years, with the silent excuse that tomorrow his journey toward destiny would begin, or perhaps the day after.
Rubbing the towel vigorously against my face, my thoughts made their usual turn to Kathy. After a love like that, a triumph and a catastrophe, I could never find my rhythm or a groove to approach life from—something that I could keep private and something that could give me direction, inspiration, meaning. There was nothing to my life anymore but a balding head, aching knees, and a faded old man filled with memories of what might have been, what should have been. I have never loved anyone or anything else and now I know I never will.
Outside my window, I watch the figures of people hurry by without a glance in my direction. As I move among them, standing beside these shadows on the subway or in the grocery store, I know that I am living my worst fear. Not one of them will ever know me, and my death, when it comes, will go ungrieved.

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