Eugene's experiences in the world beyond home share elements with classic initiation stories. Young men learning how to make their way in the world go as far back as Homer's Telemachus and have continued to fascinate throughout literary history, with more recently familiar counterparts in the fiction of Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger. A particularly interesting parallel is Nathaniel Hawthorne's Robin Molineux, who comes from good country stock, is pulled to the city by economic necessity and the promise of assistance from a father figure, and must eventually face a corrupt world on his own. As usual, however, Crews reshapes literary patterns to his own vision of contemporary man.