


This provides some natural narrative symmetry by leading to a scene at the end where he buries his dog with his estranged dying father looking on, complementing a scene from the beginning where his father buries a dog with him as a child looking on. He names his dog Occam, which escapes from his house near the climax of the book, and is hit by a car and killed by one of his colleagues, Finny. As I recall, the use of Occam's razor was the only way in which Hank considered himself a disciple of this William, which is also Hank's given name.

In Richard Russo's novel Straight Man, the protagonist Hank claims to be a philosophical disciple of William of Occam, and applies Occam's razor to his approach to deduction many times.
