The great concern of the bildungsroman is the young man's education and how it changes him: "Thus began the time of my education. Miles Rayfield taught me the secrets of drawing. Bobby Bolden taught me about music. And Eden Santana taught me about everything else." As in Hamill's other works, the main lesson which must be learned is to take part in the human attempt to overcome the barriers which separate one human or group from others. These barriers are most apparent when they appear as divisions between race, religion, and ethnicity, made most apparent here as Michael learns about Southern culture—Hank Williams' death a few days after he arrives on base opens up a new world of popular art and feeling—and most importantly, about black people, as he becomes the only white boy to enter the separate world of black music (jazz and blues), food, and eroticism, and worldly wisdom with Bobby Bolden and his friends in the mess shack. As Michael is initiated into their idiom and special knowledge, he develops a view of the dominant culture from below which will set him apart forever from the other whites, a perspective which is a source of both strength and further isolation. Lonesomeness, embodied in the myth and the music of Hank Williams, is the human condition in this world, either within one's own group and separate from others, or caught between two groups, and accepted in neither, as Michael learns when he tries to return to his new black friends after the downfall of Bobby Bolden.

But whatever the differences between these blacks and whites may be, they are still men. Perhaps the greatest distance in the novel is that between men and women, and since discovering his own manhood and the unknown territory of womanhood is Michael's most immediately felt need, sex and sexuality become the major activity of the novel—that, and fighting. Once Michael manages to relocate Eden Santana, whom he met briefly on that bus to Pensacola, she teaches him not only how to drive, the lack of which skill has been a matter of surprise to everyone, but also to his own depths of feeling, both sexual and emotional, his own ability to meet another person's needs, and the capacity of others to be always a little bit hidden, essentially mysterious and surprising. There is straightforward sex of all varieties, and there are the Games, sexual risk taking which includes flashing trains, extreme role playing, and multiple partners. Many of the Games involve erotic versions of religious ritual, since escaping the rigid bonds of sexual conformity is a metaphor for escaping other traditional bondage—in sexuality, "I was negating my own past, my Catholicism, my enforced subservience to a tyrannical code that was not of my own invention. Embracing sin, I ceased being a Catholic."

The major quest in Hamill's work is that familiar to the 1950s, the desire to rise above the mediocre, the ordinary, and live entirely in the realm of feeling and spontaneity, unfettered by rules. Breaking the bonds of traditional notions of masculinity, however, proves a little bit harder. Michael is disturbed by his growing awareness that Miles Redfield may be gay, and he is outraged by Eden's suggestion that everyone has some of the opposite sex in their makeup: "Child, you better learn quick that human beings are complicated. You hear me . . . Nobody's all one thing." Miles had taught Michael about art and a wider intellectual world, but was himself unable to bear the loss of both his art, when his paintings and...