However, the city turns out to be a "prison"; exposing some of its "darkest sides, from Israeli air raids triggering memories, to encountering wounded people, racism, and sexual exploitation".

Yasmina desiring freedom in her love life, realises that the liveliness she desires within the oceans, skies, and trees, fades away when her boyfriend, Nemer, is used by his father as a partisan for the right-wing militia, the moment his father set a marriage for convenience with a daughter of a wealthy ally, changing Yasmina's views as a "free woman" from the "perspective of Beirut’s society".

The Damascene, Farah, was a depraved victim to the Western-style idolatry of Beirut's "elite", Neshan; constantly pushing him to be on the spotlight under the conditions of "becoming rich and famous".

Abu Al Mulla wanted to steal a statue to give to someone who was going to pay him 10,000 lira; the decision that was made after he thought of ways to get his daughters back from a palace they worked as maids in.

He stole the asylum’s banner, running away from there after being "kept in for a while" (nightmares), and he went to Beirut's entrance, threw away its banner, and replaced it with "Lunatic Asylum" laughing out loud at what the place "really is after all" due to all these cultural, political, psychological, and societal "shocking" aspects that caused suffering because what they wanted was to "be recognised and feel free".

Source:[3] Subject-wise, Kim Jensen said that the aspects discussed by Al-Samman are marked by their dramatic passion and their ability to create a net of recurrent symbols which are cast and re-cast to show the inter-relatedness of the five characters.

[4] And while the novel theorises the possible social and political causes of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, George Nicolas Hage argues that the representation of Beirut as a whole through the symbolisation of characters tends to be lacking because the city is stripped out of all its positive qualities, such as being the cultural capital of the Middle East and its intellectual literacy center, in addition to the fact that characters speaking in French are ridiculed, while it's the first language that the author learned.