The book begins with a dead man travelling through a city full of living peple and ends with a living man travelling through the world of the dead. Is this always the fate of the refugee? To be living among the dead. Perhaps the sudden trauma of the refugee's flight does not allow for a normal development and maturation of c haracter. Instead, the violent change freezes the past within the refugee so that Wolfy can never escape it and becomes for himself and Rosa a link with the dead.

Wolfy is the archetypal refugee, always on the outside looking in. Always hiding away that old past which, despite his best efforts, continually resurfaces.