One of the key themes in The Beautiful Struggle is the depiction of the banal realities of Coates's upbringing as tales of mythic proportion. More broadly, Coates depicts the struggle of the young African American male in the 1980s as a kind of mythical bildungsroman, or coming of age story. He paints what have historically been represented in the mainstream media as petty disputes between young men of color as tales of vengeance, honor, and the search for meaning.

Coates threads references to epic literature and his beloved science fiction tales throughout the book, positioning himself as the underdog, with his father as the knight in shining armor and his brother Big Bill as the troubled, but fierce, gladiator. All three of these characters, are antiheroes to an extent, and it is their struggles with their internal and external worlds that further highlight Coates’s memoir as a kind of Odyssey of black young adulthood in 1980s Baltimore. Like Odysseus, Coates’s heroes are flawed, and their experiences with the tumultuous outside world lead to internal shifts and moral lessons within.

Furthermore, Coates’s writing style upholds the mythic proportions of his bildungsroman.