Major Themes
Jo Walton has said that Demolished is shaped by Freudian psychology, comparing it to The Last Battle's relation to Christianity, and emphasizing that the resolution of the plot only makes sense in a Freudian context: Reich's hatred of D'Courtney is motivated by oedipal feelings. Writer Richard Beard thought the Freudian aspects problematic: "Not all his future projections have worn so well. Reich's motives are stiffly dependent on Freudian theory, but most glaringly Bester fails to predict any type of feminism. The words girl and pretty always come as a pair."
Bester chose family names for his two main characters which apply to their competition: "Powell" suggests "power," while "reich" is the German word for "rich" and "Reich" means "Empire."
Read more about this topic: The Demolished Man
Famous quotes containing the words major and/or themes:
“Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories—those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.”
—Russell Baker (b. 1925)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)