Traveling to other planets
The characters in the novel live in a world that is so advanced that they can travel from one planet to another. Titus, the main character in the novel, mentions how he traveled both to the Moon and to Mars but that he felt no satisfaction in neither places. The planets are used here as a symbol to suggest the lengths to which a human is willing to go to feel some sort of satisfaction or happiness. Just like the children in the novel felt like it was necessary to travel to another world to feel excited, people in today’s society go to great lengths to feel pleasure.
No one on the boat
One of the first things Titus notices in his hospital room is a picture of a boat on the walls. The picture is quite dull but Titus soon notices that no one is on the boat, looking at the sea or at the horizon. The picture is important because it symbolizes the world in which Titus lived. Just like in the picture, no one in his world was interested in looking at the scenery and would rather choose to stay inside and ignore everything else happening around them.
Salad days
At one point, Violet tells Titus that those are their "salad days’’. Titus is unsure what Violet means through the term but she makes him understand that she refers to their youth. The expression "salad days’’ is thus used here as a symbol for all the pleasures common in one’s childhood and teenage years.
Everyone like violence
Another common motif in the novel is the idea that people use violence to entertain themselves. The novel for example opens with the description of Titus and his friends shocking themselves for fun and then it is mentioned that Titus’s parents attended parties where they were being strangulated. This proves just how deprecated to world has become and the extents to which people were willing to go to have fun.
Gift of a lizard
In a chapter in the novel, Titus has a dream and it is implied that the dream was actually the result of hackers messing with Titus’s feed. In the dream, Titus is given a lizard, an animal that disappeared from the face of the earth as a result of pollution. The lizard is important because in this instance it is used as a symbol to suggest the fact that Titus wanted to return to the natural state of things, to a time when everything was normal and when nature was not affected by mankind.
