The narrator's repudiation of the popular formula for success, which he repeats at length throughout [The Death Ship], links his tale with the specific demystification of many novels that are anti-bourgeois and symptomatic of the authors' estrangement from prevailing cultural ideals. On the other hand the efforts to set us straight about the real work of sailors leads to the radical core of this story of the proletarian at sea.

Presenting himself as homeless and stateless the narrator, thus, represents the common man contending with the bureaucracy of the modern nation, but cast back upon his own individual resources he, more importantly, epitomizes the proletarian in a modern, industrial society…. In telling us of the operations of the death ship, the narrator again demystifies. This time in such a way as to show that market relations dominate political relations, though it is necessary for the fact to be...