The evil father
Instead of seeing a good father who provides for and encourages his son, this novel shows an evil father who is abusive and dominating. This father is exactly the opposite of what young Richard Devine needed him to be. He doesn't give an inheritance, he takes one away. He doesn't give a life to his son, he takes his son's prospects away completely, threatening his mother and expelling Richard from his home at a young age. This comes on the tail of an ironic revelation—he wasn't even Richard's real father.
The irony of innocence
For Richard Devine, or Dawes as he is later called, what is the value of innocence? There isn't one. Ironically, innocence and moral goodness are not insulators between him and fate. He doesn't get to choose whether to be imprisoned; he is constantly arrested and rearrested even though he hasn't done anything wrong. He is like Jean Valjean, perplexed by an unjust law that doesn't respect moral innocence.
The name change
This book is about a single person, but he goes by two names and experiences himself in two very different lights. The powerful name change shows the staggering difference between his state of innocence and experience, and the unexpected, ironic nature of it shows the incomprehensibility and ineffability of the experienced state. He is not who he thought he was, so why use that old name? He isn't even properly "devine." Notice that this name change takes him from "divinity" into adult experience in a kind of Fall of Man.
The evil cousin
Dawes realizes that he actually knows the jailer personally. Who should it be who runs the jail but Dawes's own cousin, Frere. The name, ironically, means "brother" in French, but this man isn't a loving brother. He's more like Cain than Abel, and although Dawes left his community and his family behind, here is his family still! Still afflicting him. He seems completely unable to escape his true identity. No name change can take him from Frere's power.
Love and death
Sylvia is the femme fatale, it seems, because although Dawes manages to seduce her away from Frere, whom she doesn't like nearly as much as she loves Dawes, they end up dead. This irony underscores a theme that was begun when Dawes saw his dead father and was blamed for his death; love and death are thematically intertwined. The ultimate depiction of this ironic relationship is shown in the final image of the novel, Dawes and Sylvia together in the chaotic ocean, adrift a plank, Titanic style, but both dead.
