The prevailing concerns throughout this work of fiction are the questions of Who is family? and Where is home? It is a narrative which explores questions of identity in the context of modern American cultural mobility, wherein the boundaries of identity have been variously blurred, blended, and occupied by the forces of modernity and globalization. The narrative seeks to examine the usefulness of such boundaries within individual human relationships and, in particular, explores the potential for the blues as an art form to foster human relationships that are familial in nature, not in spite of its historical context but rather because of it. That the narrator himself is uncomfortably self-conscious of his own narration is representative of the novel's preoccupation with the problems of white discourse on race and cultural identity and the limits of language in general in attempts to explore and transcend such issues.