Themes
The story uses a conversational first person style, occasionally indulging in word play for its own sake. Partly this serves to involve the reader in the thought processes of the narrator, but it also points out how the narrator uses word play, circumlocution and obfuscation to keep a threatening world at arm's length. When threatened by Maud Hinkle he becomes evasive, plays "dumb", or adopts a semi-comic persona to put her off, acting out the part of psychiatrist describing her view of him as a clinically interesting fantasy.
Even when expressing a sense of fear and dread to others, he cannot help but dress it up in word play, as follows:
| “ | I am suddenly catapulted into a paranoid world where walls not only have ears, but probably eyes, and long, claw-tipped fingers... I suspect every sewer grate or second-story window conceals binoculars, a tommy-gun, or worse. | ” |
The narrator is also painfully aware of his own neuroses, and equally aware that as he moves up in criminal society they can only get worse.
The story does little with science-fiction themes. Cheap space travel, along with the technology to live comfortably anywhere in the Solar System, is taken for granted and not central to the core of the story. The world in which this story happens is the one inside the narrator's head, as it is affected by his need to enrich himself while dealing with threats both real and imagined.
Read more about this topic: Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“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)