Like an exile, the narrator feels severed from New York City and is obsessed with his other self, his urban self, which he has left behind and turned his back on.
Like Coates's first novel The Eater of Darkness, Yesterday's Burdens does not simply describe, but aesthetically summons up a particular socio-cultural moment in history, as seen and experienced by a spectator-participant.
The novel's literary form and style displays Coates's conviction that “the art-form is, inevitably, no more than the esthetic embodiment of the social form of the life it expresses.”[1] In Yesterday's Burdens Coates creates an "esthetic embodiment" of New York City that would convey the social, psychological and existential conditions of metropolitan life.
The inclusion of various mass materials in his text – advertising slogans, brand names, products, newspaper headlines, markers in subway stations, traffic signs as well as fragments of conversations and remarks – was essential to the writer's aim to document the city's sights, its sounds and its systems.
Together they form a collage of images that “ma[k]e a sound to the eyes,” as Gertrude Stein once described Coates's sense-impressions.