“…Captain Marvel was just a story in a f**king comic book. Still, Michael insisted, it might be true. Who could ever know? Maybe all they had to do was believe hard enough for it to happen.”
The narrative revolves around themes of religion, mystical beliefs, and imagination with the ideas explored through the eyes of the young protagonist. As a child infatuated by the magic and supernatural in comic books, he idolizes the heroes who can resolve his predicament with revenge and violence. Michael is raised Catholic and has to grapple with his beliefs when he witnesses an Irish Catholic gang terrorize a Jewish man. He gets a less than satisfying answer from his mother thus seeks advice and teaching from Rabbi Hirsch, a Jewish man. Through Jewish Kabbalah, he finds a religious thought that suits his situation as he sees a chance to achieve mystical powers like his comic book imaginations.
“In his mind, he saw his mother's disappointed face and Father Heaney's angry eyes. Worse: he felt suddenly alarmed, as if he had come close to the sin of sloth.”
Michael’s journey is essentially a quest to find a religious thought that makes sense if placed alongside his human experience. As a young mind, the complexities of religious differences conflict with his moral compass thus breeds his curiosity. His Catholic belief is linked to the fear that he will appear as a sinner before the eyes of his parent, priest, and God. But this is challenged when he observes the violent behavior of fellow Irish Catholics which shatters his link to religious conviction.
“…he remembered the evening of his beating and the four Falcon stinking of beer, and he wanted to hurt them back. He wanted to cause them pain. To turn their faces purple.”
Michael is caught in a predicament of which he has to contend with religious beliefs, violence, and revenge. He sees the violence against Jewish people and finds no outright solution to right the wrong but revenge. However as an individual with a devout mindset his Catholic beliefs and morals conflict with this thought. When he is also beaten for building a friendship with the Jewish Rabbi it nurtures a fit of deep anger for the gang. Thus, the novel highlights the true evil of violence in that it is cyclical or transferrable in nature as Michael is also down the path to enacting violence.
