Frailty of the Body

Through the eyes of the doctor Marc Schlosser, the novel portrays the human body as a frail sort of machine, which frequently betrays evidence of a person’s life of excess. As with many of the other philosophies put forth by Marc, the novel contains both ample evidence that his extremely blunt view of human nature and the human body is correct -- and the novel also contains many more, subtler instances of Marc being incorrect. This combination of correctness and incorrectness challenges the reader to evaluate Marc’s beliefs of the world and form their own individual beliefs about Marc’s accuracy, or lack thereof.

Marc’s vivid novel-opening descriptions of his daily medical practice portray his patients as frail, underneath his discerning medical eyes. The passages in which Marc describes the relatively obvious nature of his patients’ wild lifestyles also establish...