Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The assignment was a critical point in Goober's life because it forced him to wake up, look at his life, and face the real world. Before the assignment, he lived the idyllic life of a child. "Things were simple and uncomplicated...everything seemed beautiful...the entire world attainable" (Chapter 8). The assignment forced Goober to examine himself, and although he found himself inadequate to the task of facing the world with the integrity he knew he should have, the fact that he had embarked upon the road of self-evaluation and searching opened the door to the possibility that he might eventually find a life worth living.
I think Goober is important because, while he is weak, he remains sensitive to a higher ideal, and his struggles - tentative though they are - to act accordingly, give him a kind of "everyman" role in the book. He is a regular guy living in an evil world, and I think his story realistically illustrates the extreme difficulty of remaining true to a noble standard in an environment of corruption and deceit.
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