I like that he's the funny and likeable 16 year old version of a man who is implicitly quite a nasty piece of work. It's very easy to interpret a lot of his behaviours as selfishly ignorant, but at the same time it's very hard to deny that he is a victim of a lot of manipulation and circumstance! Really a rare and shining example of a character who's that hard to pin down as strictly a good guy you like or a bad guy you hate