Youth and education
School is the setting and primary imagery of the novel, because Torless is at boarding school. This constitutes a heroic departure from home, because now home does not involve his family. He is able to participate with his community as his own self, but that makes him chaotic and unsure, because he is in the story that tells him through time who he really is. His youth and his role as a student both point to this novel being a "bildungsroman," a coming-of-age story.
Intimacy and peers
Torless struggles to make friends because his questions about sexuality leave him chronically hesitant and unsure how to behave in his community. He ends up with kids on the fringe who are getting into trouble, and as the four main characters converge, the reader sees that through all their bullying and harassing of one another, there is a shared desire for intimacy that keeps them intimately involved in each other's life. Eventually this imagery experience leads the bullies to initiate a painful scene where by rape, they expose the four young men as latent homosexuals in a repressive society.
Sexuality and self
Torless experiences sexuality in his experience of self that is different than the types of sexuality that are promoted in the culture of his school or community. That means that he has to carry around his sexuality with a giant question mark. Is he gay? Is it something else? Is this just a weird experience of fetish or dysphoria? In the end, he proves that he is gay by longingly participating in sex with another male. The truth of himself is revealed to himself through time as imagery.
Guilt and experience
Like the passionate man who shot Coleridge's Albatross, this protagonist is also set aflame by a terrible guilt that makes him confess. The imagery of experience is basically the depth of the novel, because Torless is chronically examining his self in light of new data that he gets from each day of life. His participation in a rape makes him a symbol for ultimate guilt, but that guilt is complicated by a lot of mitigating factors. Basini is inviting and consensual, so Torless only bears the guilt of being willing to rape. That is an experience of his shadow and it brings him into a new respect and horror for his own potential and nature.
