Content Warning: This guide and the source text contain references to police violence, rape, anti-gay prejudice and violence, antisemitism, and the persecution of Jewish people by the Nazi regime.

The idea of escape is the novel’s most central theme. Growing up in Prague, Joe longs to become an escape artist, and, under the tutelage of Bernard Kornblum, he repeatedly risks his life in pursuit of this goal. Dismayed by Joe’s near-drowning, Kornblum makes the thematic subtext of this work explicit:

He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting (37).

Kornblum practices escape for its own sake. For him, the challenge itself is the point. For Joe, on the other hand, any trap he can devise is only a metaphor for the “invisible chains” that are far harder to escape. Joe’s escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938 is perhaps his greatest feat, but he cannot escape the burden of his responsibility to free his family, nor can he escape the guilt he feels at having survived the Holocaust when so many others did not.