Life in despair
The novel depicts life through lens of King's despair. He resorts to painful life decisions, often illegal and immoral, because he feels he has no other path in life. He plants seeds as a vague request to the universe to bring him a better future than his present, and his despair is also depicted through his need. His hopelessness is manifested poignantly when he urges his own wife to abort the baby that, secretly he wants, but is too panicked to celebrate. He believes the child is better dead than alive, because he struggles to be hopeful about his own life.
Poverty
Their home is shabby, and their lives are thinly veiled. In fact, invaders can come and go in their community as they please, so that they are never really insulated from the outside world. King depends on people that are dangerous and potentially immoral, and he resorts to gambling and theft. He is unable to make an honest wage in his community, because there are simply no jobs, and the jobs that do exist are not hiring such as he. The dilemma of money is underscored by the constant presence of money and jewelry in the plot.
Portraits of insanity
Violence is depicted through the lens of insanity and mental illness, because people do crazy things in panicked states of mind. The schizophrenic drifter is a symbol of the way that mental illness leads King to endure worse fates than he might have otherwise, because he is willing to try anything, whether another "normal" person might accept his behavior morally or not. He is "insane" because he is pushed beyond the order of society into a chaos that is truly complicated and harrowing.
The imagery of futility
When Elmore and King go toe to toe, King cheats and ends up dead. Elmore ends up sleeping with his mom, engaged to her even though the reader knows that Elmore had the hots for Tonya. It is as if Elmore's goal is specifically to ruin King. King's futility is underscored again and again by the plot, and though he attempts to take matters into his own hands, like the jewelry heist, he finds that he is unable to change his fate.
