Marathe and Steeply on choosing — "How to choose any but a…"

Here the theme's abstract engine runs in the open. Marathe makes the father the precondition of freedom itself: without "a loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach," a person can only make a child's greedy choices, and a freedom-from with no one to teach the freedom-to is just candy within arm's reach. It's the cleanest statement in the book of what every wrecked or absent father in the theme costs — Himself's distance, Poor Tony's disowner, Gately's never-met ironworker — recast as a political axiom. The son who is never taught to choose doesn't become free; he becomes fatally easy to feed.