Burke used to, whenever he went to the city to catch a Yankees game, throw his money around to every homeless man on the street, feeling it was the right thing to do; except one time he did that, and he got to the stadium and realized he didn’t have enough money for the Bud Light tall boy he always got during the third inning. And in him, he felt an unyielding rise of contempt for the of only hours ago, that he was something and now is something and that they aren’t the same something's. But that the change was Germicidal, and it was just him, this moneyless and beerless man in the bleachers. Man made in God’s image, yet some men are homeless and some are beerless, and there must be this big bearded guy miles and miles in the sky who doesn’t have a home and can’t even catch a buzz.

— A.J. Smith

He blurred his then and his now—in a fantastic drunken distortion—with the thinness and thinness of now and before, respectively; wisps of Burke with Jane infiltrated him without her, the way dry oars still taste of salt. And it made Burke trace Jane’s silhouette in his bedsheets with his lips, wondering if his sadness and loneliness was of any import to the grander human comedy, like the swooning soul of Joyce’s Gabriel, lost amidst a universe of snow—because, in small, unnoticeable ways, must not the sea taste of oars?

— A.J. Smith