Ernie Miller, a CAS freshman majoring in English, took a long drag from a cigarette while sitting on a stoop a few paces from Brittany Residence Hall. He can usually be found here or curled up with a leather-bound notebook under a sad-looking tree in Washington Square Park.

“I feel like people just don’t get us,” Miller said. “Our generation is so misunderstood. It’s like we’re lost or something. The professors push us through these progressions, but they stifle our true ability to write. I want to change American Literature, but this process — this Writing the Essay bull — won’t let me.”

Miller wears his hair slicked back and admires concise language. His shelves are packed with 1930s novels and booze.

“I find myself most productive when I’m belligerently drunk,” Miller said with a Class Activity Board plastic cup martini in hand.

He chuckled to himself before scribbling in his Moleskine notebook, “I’m reckoning.”

His roommate, Stern freshman Gerry Stein, is not so certain of Miller’s genius.

“I’m sure he’s intelligent,” Stein said. “I just don’t think it’s constructive to get wasted on a Tuesday night while scribbling World War I stories and muttering ‘that’s so meta’ before passing out on his desk. And he sometimes uses a pipe to smoke. Like, what the hell?”

Despite persisting doubts about whether or not his visions are produced by creative ingenuity or absinthe, Miller is confident in his work.

“The goal is to write the next Great American Novel,” Miller said. “We are children of the Internet age — the 404 Not Found Generation — and this generation’s upbringing has torn us from the rest of society. We are trying to make sense of it all. Nothing makes sense. It’s almost a violent misunderstanding, like a symbolic war has occurred. I want to chronicle that out.”

Equally important aspirations include “hooking up with Tisch girls, getting a Nobel Prize in Literature and maybe doing the Writers in Paris summer program.” Miller often finds parallels between his Writing the Essay section and Parisian writing salons that housed American novelists in the 1920s. He loves his professor and always tells his friends how enlightening the classes are, even though he rarely goes to them.

“Ernie is a little pretentious, to be honest,” his professor Mark Davis confessed. “He’s decent, but I wouldn’t recommend him for Mercer Street or share his work with my colleagues out of pride. I just wish that he’d show up to class without smelling like last night’s Two Buck Chuck.”

“See, our elders just don’t see it,” Miller said when presented with his professor’s comments. “And I think that my stuff is way better than that Mercer Street crap.”

Fueled by high-functioning, low-level alcoholism, Miller believes that his new book, which is about a group of Americans roaming around Europe after World War I, will reveal the conflicting identities that make up this generation.

“Let me be clear: my book is not ‘The Sun Also Rises,’” Miller said. “Hemingway has always been an idol and inspiration, but I would never try to imitate his legacy. Still, his life wouldn’t be that bad to have.”

At press time, Miller was trying to imagine what bullfights are like.

A version of this article appeared in the Wednesday, April 1 print edition. Email Norwegia Cruise at [email protected].