Near the end of the poem, the speaker suggests that the father is a person of some learning: “He goes to the toilet to contemplate / Man’s estrangement from a man-made world” (Lines 15-16). He also carries a satchel “stuffed with books” (Line 5) to work and then back home. While he eats dinner alone, he pages through a book. When he attends to his bathroom before bed, he thinks deep thoughts, suggesting he reads philosophical books that test the horizons of existence. These books suggest to him that purpose in life is not the same thing as meaning.

The father is alone despite an office job in a teeming city, despite the long commuter ride in a train crammed with people, and despite sharing his home with his family. The city offers no comfort; neither does home. His children ignore him and find him irrelevant. When “[h]is sullen children often have refused to share / Jokes and secrets with him” (Lines 20-21), he seeks solace in the privacy of his reading. In short, the poem offers the father as a template for the existential anxiety that individuals in this modern world do not belong anywhere.

Surrounded by people, the father feels isolated and alienated, a part of but apart from his world.