Initially unsuccessful, the pair live in dumpsters, eating rotten fruit and stale cakes, unable to return home as failures.
Disillusionment with Independence Ayo Kenhinde remarks that Kill Me Quick' "presents a harsh account of urban life in postcolonial Kenya."
The novel opens with the lines: Kenhinde remarks that this is what Mwangi sees every day, and that "he has a vision of life as hell."
Within the novel, the protagonists are "Frustrated again and again by a hypocritical society that pays lip service to the value of formal education, but fails to reward those who believe it promises."
Smiley uses them as a teaching tool for students, believing that these fictional accounts are accurate representations of real urban experiences.
Passages are selected and used to create a geography for a Kenyan urban center, which is then used to teach students the similarities between other cities.