As the story continues, the narrator increasingly detaches himself from reality, causing him to appear unsentimental, until he encounters an unconventional family that provides him with comfort. After dealing with the lost of his cat, the narrator descends into a depressed state, causing him to disengage with people and events around him. Because of his emotional withdrawal, the opal miner’s death has little effect on him as he disregards the opal miner’s death and focuses on the location of his comic books. As the narrator stares at the corpse of the opal miner, he decides that the body of the opal miner “was an it, the thing [he] was looking at, not a him” (17). By having the narrator describe the opal miner’s body as an “it” rather than
