The Mosquito Coast, by Paul Theroux, tells the story of Allie Fox, a brilliant and innovative inventor with "nine patents, six pending", who disdains all culture modern American, and those who believe that there is an inevitable war on the horizon for America. Allie is very critical of his vision of America, the American dream, and American consumerism. Allie spoke openly about her negative attitude towards the modern lifestyle that has developed in the United States. He believed that the concept of religion was useless and that the government system was corrupt. He is an unstable and antisocial individual whose paranoia leads him to drastically alter his stable family and move it from Hatfield, America to the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. In Honduras, Allie purchases a clearing known as Jeronimo and although it starts out as a simple clearing, it soon transforms into a fully functioning, self-sustaining village. The novel is written in the first person, from the point of view of Charlie Fox, Allie's thirteen-year-old son. Charlie was ignorant of aspects of modern society due to his father's continued and intentional refuge from these evils. As he matured emotionally and intellectually, the new knowledge Charlie gained led to a change in his father's opinion from a point of view of admiration to a point of view of fear. Theroux uses diction, foreshadowing, and flashbacks to describe this coming of age through Charlie's first-person narration. Theroux begins the novel by having Charlie constantly brag about his father, through diction, it is implied that Charlie tends to idolize his father. “Dad, an inventor, was a perfect genius with anything mechanical” (7). The diction of “an inventor” and “a perfect genius” is...... middle of paper ...... level of maturity high enough to understand the moral of the story he was told by Mr. Polski. This sudden flashback and reference finally allows him to understand that his father was not actually the man he saw before. Just like Spider Mooney, Charlie realizes that he was actually better off without his father. Reflecting on the previous year, Charlie recalls: “I had once believed in my father and the world had seemed very small and old. He was gone, and now I barely believed in myself, and the world was limitless” (374). Charlie begins to think back and ruminate on the days when he believed in his father, he states that the world was "small" and "old" at that time, having a negative connotation on the way his life was in the past. Then he looks at how he is now, how the world is limitless, how his father had kept him so closed and so protected.