Please rate the start of my finished novel?

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annon

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It's hard to explain exactly what caused it, but following one decision that was not really a decision at all, a series of events were to take place, and for a short time I would feel that I'd compromised something. Not wanting by some cheap trick to raise an unjustified sense of anticipation though, I should make it clear now that this would later transpire to be ill-founded, and perhaps even foolish.
Leaving the house each morning I'd come to think that a part of myself was still asleep in bed. I was functioning under the belief that my soul was immune to the ill effects of a day at work because the bit of me that mattered most didn't have to endure it. As I half-walked, half-ran to catch the train though, a faint sense of doubt was known to surface.
Such was the breadth of my indifference that it was hard to imagine what drove me. Attempting to interpret my own actions, I looked without profit to others. What had happened to the sense of higher-calling which once governed me?
The same feelings still persisted, yet nothing would suggest this strange phenomenon was anything more than delusion--a necessary expedient to adulthood which, to my shame, I still hadn’t shed. All signs pointed to the unhappy conclusion that I, like the many, were sinking by slow degrees into an acceptance of mediocrity.
As friends settled down and became dispassionately concerned with current affairs, I sensed my acquaintance was coming to be an embarrassment. Had they come now to regret past openness? Were they perhaps even ashamed at having lacked the courage to take certain chances? ... I marveled at my embattled egotism's shaping of things--where else could I have acquired such deranged explanations? Little wonder that I kept so much ti myself. If I fancied myself as one of life's gamblers, then the question would be posed as to just what it was that I felt I was gambling on--quite obviously leading the same tawdry existence as the next person, only refusing to...
 
I didn't even bother reading the last half because I wasn't following the first half. Try using less words, parallel structure and eliminating dangling participles. The first answer here was right. There were too many thesaurused words. I know all of these words, but together they don't flow and don't interest me. You've given me a lot to try to digest without actually giving me any information except that the character rides a train and goes to work.
 
This makes me wonder if you know what you're writing, and you claim you've completed your entire story. Is your story a journal entry full of inner voice thoughts on life or it it drama? I don't see any drama here. True storytelling is drama, not writing pastiches of life.

If this is the start of your story, you have neglected to lead us to the inciting inciting that really starts your story.

If you really like what you're doing, you're going to have a limited audience and a hard time getting it published. These types of minimalist plots do get picked up on occasion.

I love what Persiphone told you if she opened the book and the first sentence was: "it's hard to explain"; she'd say 'okay', close it, and put it down. I completely agree. Your job as an author is to lead us somewhere and let us figure it out. It is hard, but if it's hard for the reader to figure it out, then this is simply a journal entry.
 
Too many big words; actually, too many thesaurused words.
Might be well written, but a whole book with that writing would just kill me. It seems so fake and overthought, it doesn't flow.
 
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