Colin Singleton

Character Analysis

Child prodigy and serial Katherine-dater, Colin Singleton is one serious dude. He's always spurting off random factoids that no one cares about, like that "fetor hepaticus" is the name for bad breath (4.8) or "the world's largest wooden church is in Finland" (5.4). Um, okay… good to know?

Predictable Prodigy

It's not just that Colin is a child prodigy—he also wants to share these facts with everyone because he finds them super interesting. Hassan explains it like this:

"Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting. Honestly, I've seen him do it with the phone book. He'll be like, 'Oh, there are twenty-four listings for Tischler. How fascinating.'" (9.89)

Now you know Shmoop loves to read, but even we don't read the phone book for fun. Colin's thirst for knowledge comes from his desperate desire to become a genius and make a big discovery—instead of being a washed-up prodigy, he wants to be remembered for contributing to the world in some way.

He doesn't think of his life as all out in front of him, waiting to happen (like most seventeen-year-olds do); nope, Colin thinks the best has already passed and refuses to let himself forget this. He claims, "the problem was that this most special, magnificent, brilliant boy was—well, not. The Problem itself was that He didn't matter" (2.17).

All Colin wants is to matter to Katherine, to someone, to anyone. In fact, Colin begins working on his theorem about the Katherines breaking up with him so he can figure out a way to matter.

We get that. Don't we all want to be important in some way?

The Katherines

But Colin can't seem to get Katherine out of his mind, and even as he works on his theorem, all he can think about is getting her back. His last name even means a person not conjoined to twin. "He had dated nineteen girls. All of them had been named Katherine. And all of them—every single solitary one—had dumped him" (3.26). Yikes.

Hmm… is anyone else sensing a pattern here? Sure, Colin only goes for Katherines and not any other girl; but we're more interested in the way he describes the phenomenon. He only cares about himself, see, and he's so focused on getting dumped that he can't remember anything before that in the relationship. The relationships are all just clones of one another.

Though he remembers specifics about K-19, apart from that all his relationships are identical. The Katherines are more a symbol of Colin's view of women and relationships than they are about any single woman—that's why they're all described in one fell swoop right at the end, why they're referred to by numbers, and why he can't remember if he was the dumper or the dumpee. All the women in his life are just copies of one another, and he's playing out the same relationship over and over again until he finally breaks the cycle with Lindsey.

Not-Unique and Loving It

In the end, Colin realizes that he can't use a math formula to plot out his entire life and he can't get the answers about his love life from numbers. It's a shame, because if he could predict the future with math, he'd be golden.

We'd like to point out that the novel doesn't end with Colin figuring out how he's unique and amazing and becoming a genius. Nope—instead he learns to sit back and see where his relationship with Lindsey takes him. He spends most of his time wanting to be special and extraordinary, but by the end, he feels "not-unique in the very best possible way" (epil.32).

We think that makes Colin special—just the way he is.