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
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