Superficially, the novel follows the author’s progress though 1930s Europe, wearing little and enduring hunger, contempt, and fatigue: “the life of the vermin”.

He wrote poetry, the autobiographical book 'The Thief's Journey', the novels: 'Our Lady of the Flowers' and 'Miracle of the Rose', 'Querelle of Brest', and 'Funeral Rites'.

Indeed, Genet establishes a "constructed reader," a fictional personification of the bourgeois values of the late 1940s, against which to measure his deviance from the "norms" of society.

This is manifest in his denoting of the reader as “you.” The novel is structured around a series of homosexual love affairs between the author/anti-hero and various criminals, con artists, pimps, and a detective.

Perhaps the most telling example of this is Genet’s argument that it is “the spittle [Stilitano] passed from one cheek to the other and which he would sometimes draw out in front of his mouth like a veil” [15] which makes him so attractive.

Genet goes on to compare his own spit, “spun glassware, transparent and fragile”,[16] with that of Stilitano, which he imagines smeared on his penis.

Indeed, despite being ridiculed by the police after a tube of Vaseline is found in his pocket (“Watch out you don’t catch cold.

You’d give your guy whooping cough” [23]), Genet describes the tube as “a banner telling the invisible legions of my triumph over the police”.

Finally, Genet appropriates Christian language and concepts to pursue an alternative form of sainthood with its own trinity of virtues – homosexuality, theft, and betrayal.

Each burglary is set up as quasi-religious ritual, and the narrator describes the preparation for criminality as like that of a monk in a vigil of prayer, readying himself for a holy life.

As stated above, 'The Thief's Journal' is a semi-autobiographical novel, so when the narrator commits to a life of crime, the same way Genet did, we know we are reading a first-hand account of a working-class, queer person in the 1930s.

However, poverty isn't seen as one of the central themes of the novel as it's mostly represented explicitly at the beginning; this is because Genet was adopted into a community of artists within Europe, so he became protected.

Firstly, a law was implemented around the 30s in some parts of Europe called the 'Three-strike Policy', which essentially meant that if you committed three crimes, no matter how small or tedious, you were put into prison.

This particular entry gives us an insight into the true economic crisis of Europe in the 30s, as the narrator explains that 'Spain at the time was covered with vermin, its beggars'.

Beggars, like himself, are presented as disgusting and dirty within the novel by Genet, and, for the narrator, the lice that infested his, and everyone else's bodies, were seen as jewels.

Thus, Genet's poverty is an important part of the novel as, if he didn't live an impoverish life and have extreme struggles, he would not have found his community and writing 'The Thief's Journal', would not have been possible.

Using gruesome descriptions of an unhygienic body and lice, Genet manages to significantly highlight how truly dehumanising living in poverty can be.