In the following essay, Moss provides an overview of Ship of Fools, concluding that it "is basically about love, a human emotion that teeters helplessly between need and order."

Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools is the story of a voyage—a voyage that seems to take place in many dimensions. A novel of character rather than of action, it has as its main purpose a study of the German ethos shortly before Hitler's coming to power in Germany. That political fact hangs as a threat over the entire work, and the novel does not end so much as succumb to a historical truth. But it is more than a political novel. Ship of Fools is also a human comedy and a moral allegory. Since its author commits herself to nothing but its top layer, and yet allows for plunges into all sorts of undercurrents, it is...