Frequently he describes an unknown person doing something (saying something or moving or yelling) before clarifying that the person was in fact himself.

The most notable instance is when the kids get blown up and he described hearing someone yell before stating that the feeling in his throat meant it must have been him. It’s jarring in juxtaposition to the first person narration throughout the light novel. Oda is simultaneously a person who is very alive, and a person who is not. I think that’s why he gets along with Dazai so well, on a certain level he understands Dazai’s disconnect from life. I also think it’s why he loses his will to live so completely by the end of the story, he didn’t have a full grasp of it at the beginning.

Odasaku was a man who knew how to live, he had many reasons to wake up every day and keep going, but he wasn’t a man that loved life itself. So when he lost those reasons, he lost everything.

The reason he didn’t push Dazai on his worldview was because he didn’t know how. He couldn’t teach something he didn’t know, he could show Dazai his reasons but he could never give Dazai his own. Because a ‘reason to live’ will only get you so far, your reason to live needs to simply be to be alive or else it can be taken away.

Dazai tells Odasaku that there is no reason to live if we all simply die anyway. Oda cannot refute this because he doesn’t know how to disagree, he isn’t connected enough to his own life to explain to Dazai why it is important to live anyway. He just goes through the motions of life.

in reality the grand majority of genuine punk rockers are the kindest people youll ever meet and thats exactly why theyre so fed up with how busted and callous most if not all major institutions are

Dracula book: an evil count who only sees the world as a resource to be drained for his own pleasure is stopped by the group of people who deeply care for each other

Dracula in media: a tragic romantic hero, main love interest of one of the protagonists who must be liberated from her dull little life

Frankenstein book: any human has capacity for evil when completely abandoned and shunned by the world and the people who brought him into it

Frankenstein in media: don't play God because it's against nature's laws

Jekyll and Hyde book: repression and only caring about external appearances can cause your worst impulses to indulge themselves in dangerous ways if ignored for too long