Farina uses the campus more as a microcosm of the world at large. He keeps bringing in visitors and flashbacks from the outside. There is no sense of sanctuary here, or eternal youth. Like the winter winds of the region, awareness of mortality blows through every chapter. The novel ends with the death of a major character.
Undergraduate consciousness rests in part on a set of careless assumptions about being immortal.
The elitism and cruelty often found in college humor arises from this belief in one's own Exemption, not only from time and death, but somehow from the demands of life as well. For Gnossos, Exemption is nothing he can either take for granted or have illusions about. In the course of the book, Gnossos looks at a number of possibilities, including Eastern religion, road epiphanies, mescaline, love. All turn out to have a flaw of some kind. What he's left with to depend on is his own coherence, an extended version of 1950s Cool.