What Kind of Paradise

Jane/Esme is the novel’s narrator and protagonist. She is characterized initially through her relationship with her father and her non-traditional, isolationist upbringing. She idolizes her father and craves his approval. He homeschools her using a curriculum that includes traditional high school subjects like math and science but that he augments with lessons on philosophy and survival skills. Jane/Esme is highly intelligent and adept at absorbing the information her father teaches her but is always on the lookout to parrot back his exact ideas and ideologies to please him. At the beginning of the novel, she accepts her father’s worldview as her own.

However, Jane/Esme is a character who is defined in large part by her coming-of-age arc. She will have to develop her own, distinct identity as she comes to terms with the truth about her family. She achieves autonomy and independence in large part because of her intelligence. She teaches herself rudimentary coding and the basics of the burgeoning field of computer science, and because of that, she is able to get a better grasp on her father’s troubled mental state and get herself to San Francisco. Once there, she obtains a job in part through her connection to Lionel but in larger part because she has the requisite skills that Signal is looking for.