Neumann traps Sarah Goodman, an insecure graduate student trying to find her place at Yale, into initiating formal charges of sexual harassment against Hopfgartner.

Troncoso's novel explores how a man of Mexican-German heritage navigates a complex moral universe, and how his experience reveals the differences and links between righteousness and evil in the quest for the truth.

In an interview for Prime Number Journal in 2015, Troncoso said: "I had read Heidegger as a graduate student at Yale, and Being and Time was fascinating to me, particularly the concept of Being-towards-death....I was always shocked by the intellectual violence I witnessed at many Ivy League seminars, how people would just eviscerate each other with words, in pursuit of 'The Truth,' and how often they would lose themselves in these arguments.

"[2] A reviewer from Janus Head, a journal of Continental Philosophy, Literature, and Phenomenological Psychology, wrote: "It is with this trio [Helmut Sanchez, Ariane Sassolini, and Detective Jack Rosselli] that the author excels as both fictionist and moral epistemologist.

When her crisis arrives, again in the form of knowledge, she must make a life-altering decision, and her one of compassion and forgiveness for Helmut betrays a moral fortitude far exceeding that of her beloved.

Unable to identify the real killer, motivated not by vengeance but by idealism, Rosselli allows an innocent man, Atwater, to suffer at the hands of thugs.

When juxtaposed, the Nietzschean valor of Sanchez, the Christian pragmatism of Sassolini and the blind inductivism of Rosselli make for a sustained, intellectual tension that perfectly complements the narrative one.

", or when the street-wise Rosselli puts forth a rather academic-sounding theory of racial division, the author is careful never to make the conflict between his characters' "truths" too explicit.

"[3] A reviewer from The Forward wrote: "A sentimental tale of love triumphant over bigotry and zealotry, The Nature of Truth enables its philosemitic author to wear his heart on his sleeve, right beside an imaginary yellow star.

Over dinner at the end of the novel, Jonathan Atwater—a gay librarian who, like a Jew victimized by Nazi storm troopers, was assaulted by homophobic thugs—presents his theory about the decline of civilization.