The struggling artist
The motif of the struggling artist is that a passionate person only really wants to do one thing, but in order to sustain themselves, they must already have ethos as an artist, or else their art has to be masterful enough to command its audience without respect to ethos. Therefore, protagonists like our unnamed protagonist often struggle beneath the weight of that paradox and one other important paradox that completes the motif: secretly, the artist in question must doubt their own worth as a human, so that the art is done in defiance of a broader self-esteem conundrum.
Dysfunction at home
The reader is not subjected directly to the story of dysfunction. First, we encounter the dysfunction of the protagonists neighbors only tangentially. She hears screaming and loud noises and contemplates intervening. Then, suddenly, the book does introduce that couple through a comic book. The comic book is a portrait of dysfunction in the home, quite literally, showing what all readers would wonder: Why doesn't the couple just break up and walk away if they hate each other so much?
The unconscious energy reader
There is a futuristic symbol in the book, a hypothetical helmet with a screen that would detect the quality of unconscious energy in the room. This is an obvious symbol for clairvoyance, the ability to correctly discern the future through hidden clues in a person's body language. The reason this works is because a person might be unconscious to cues that are definite giveaways for elements of a relationship that are fatal—like hatred and resent. The helmet just gives concrete language to that sixth sense. If the helmet sees hatred or resent without enough empathy to provide a way forward, the helmet indicates the relationships inevitable failure. It is a symbol of doom.
The abortion
Another symbol of doom is the protagonist's decision to abort her child. To her credit, one must notice that she cannot even really provide for herself in her situation, but remember that to the protagonist, life is sometimes a battle because of low self-esteem stemming from her upbringing. This means that she wears the guilt of her abortion like an albatross around her neck, constantly allowing her self-esteem dilemma to attack her. She wonders if her fate is difficult because God hates her and is punishing her. That is not the case, as the book shows, but it is the quality of her experience.
The book within a book
The metanarrative quality of "Branford the Benevolent Bacterium" makes the reader consider the meaning of books within books. The book belongs within the context of the other sections of the book as a whole, but within its real life context, the reader is placed into the position of the protagonist. We read the protagonist's favorite (and fictitious) book. The book within a book is perhaps an invitation to consider the struggling writer motif as a personal expression of suffering on the part of the author.
