Loneliness

The action, characterizations, and narration of the book are all grounded in one central theme, the contention that an unavoidable part of the human experience is a fundamental, inevitable loneliness . In some ways, this is something of an "existentialist" perspective, existentialism being a school of philosophy that contends that the individual human experience of existence is all there is - there is no pre-life, no after life, no spiritual context in which existence plays out or which gives it meaning. In existentialist philosophy, therefore, loneliness is a fundamental and inescapable component of existence. Every individual is just that, an individual, isolated and alone, with any attempts to develop either meaning or companionship (as a means to alleviate the loneliness of being an individual) ultimately ending up futile.

That said, much of the book's narrative consists of ways in which characters search for and/or embrace circumstances in which...