Said's essay explores the implications of being exiled from one's homeland, with an emphasis upon the special characteristics of the phenomenon in the modern age and the broader cultural factors influenced by it.

Exile, Said asserts, has been viewed in literature in the romanticized sense of somehow enriching the one who experiences it. This may be true in some way, but the overriding fact is that there is something irredeemable and unbearable about it, especially in the modern age when the technology available to governments wishing to expel people from their homelands is overwhelmingly powerful.

Groups that have been forced from their homeland have tended to engage in an extreme nationalism and a suspicion of anyone not part of the group. The ethnicities Said regards as most typical of the attributes caused by the phenomenon, in the twentieth century, are the Jews, Palestinians, and Armenians. Each of these peoples, Said says, has had to construct a special kind of identity for themselves as a remedy for the condition imposed upon them.

Probably because Said was Palestinian himself, he dwells to an extent on the irony of the Jews, a proverbially and perpetually homeless people, having caused the exile of the Palestinians. He regards the bombardment of the Arab refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 as a way in which Israel sought, probably unconsciously, to deny the fact of the Palestinians' condition of exile. Yet overall his main point, despite his criticism of Israel, is to stress the essential likeness between the Jewish and Palestinian experiences.

Said deals extensively with literature and the prominence of the psychology of exile in the work of certain writers, such as Joseph Conrad and Theodor Adorno. But he also seems to identify the genre of the novel with the characteristic mindset associated with exile. In novels, the protagonist is typically a person who is restlessly learning and moving from place to place as if one without a home. Said contrasts this with the genre of the national epic in which characters such as Achilles and Odysseus exist within proscribed limits. Achilles must die, and Odysseus must return to Ithaca.

Incidentally, one would think Said would take notice of the fact that in the Aeneid, a national epic if ever there were one, the whole story revolves around Aeneas having been exiled from Troy. If the Aeneid is not a paradigm of literature about exile, one wonders what book or poem is. Said also deals with linguistic matters, drawing distinctions among the meanings of exile, expatriate, émigré, and refugee.

Despite the wide-ranging subjects dealt with in relation to the phenomenon, "Reflections on Exile" is basically a kind of snapshot, a brief meditation on themes Said treated repeatedly in his writings as a whole. It is written in a deeply erudite style, and in spite of the essay's brevity, the subject is given a complex and sometimes difficult-to-penetrate analysis.