Literary Significance & Criticism
This novel can be most clearly understood as a commentary on globalization via a fictional account of the effects of the Earth's expanding political, economic and social influence over human inhabited planets. Barnes appears to suggest that those most harmed by globalization are the ones least willing to change in response.
Read more about this topic: A Million Open Doors
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“I went to a literary gathering once.... The place was filled with people who looked as if they had been scraped up out of drains. The ladies ran to draped plush dresses—for Art; to wreaths of silken flowerets in the hair—for Femininity; and, somewhere between the two adornments, to chain-drive pince-nez—for Astigmatism. The gentlemen were small and somewhat in need of dusting.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)