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:
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“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what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul?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, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)