Stephen´s adventures with Keith and his school life

Stephen's adventures with Keith have different effects on Stephen's school life.

On the one hand, his spying activities act as a safety valve for him to escape from his school problems. As Stephen is bullied at school, his adventures with Keith help him to distract himself from this reality. The fact that he knows something that shouldn’t be revealed gives him the strength to resist the abuse he has to suffer from his classmates:  “In the lunch hour, Henning and Neale perform their current routine of seizing my ears and rocking my head back and forth as they chant, “Weeny weedy Whitley” and for once I feel sustained against them by sheer importance of the secret knowledge lodged between those two abused ears of mine”.

However, on the other hand, his spying adventures also act as a distractor. Stephen doesn’t pay attention at school because he cannot stop thinking about his investigation, as this quote ironically proves:  “How can I think about the economy of Canada when I know there's a foreign agent somewhere out there in the evening sunshine studying the geography of his very neighbourhood?” When his father questions him about his studies, it becomes clear that Stephen is not making any progress at school. His intelligence is only focused on finding out a solution to the problem he is investigating with Keith.

To conclude, what is proved by these ideas is the importance that Keith assigns to his investigations. They seem to occupy most of his time and his thoughts. Nothing outside them seems to matter. School life, which is so important at Stephen's stage of life, counts to nothing compared to his investigations.