The Star Pit is about freedom and cages, growing up, and child abuse as a social phenomenon. The narrator is Vyme, an alcoholic who struggles to stay sober amid a society fraught with cruelty. Delany begins the novel with Vyme's observations of the children and an ecologarium where his procreation group lives. These two topics are very important to the themes of the novel; the welfare of children is an unending concern for Vyme, and the ecologarium symbolizes the cages he feels trapped inside of.

"I didn't make a sound. But I put my head down and barreled against the plastic wall." His assault breaks open the ecologarium, allows the animals inside to escape, startles the children under care, and alarms his wives and husbands, who do not realize that Vyme's actions represent a convulsive effort to seize some measure of freedom for himself...