Krol exposes our own callousness through Odell, and we can laugh all we want at how he's being deceived by the other characters in the book until a couple of things strike us. What happened to our compassion that this person who is being treated like dirt by everyone around him elicits our scorn instead of our sympathy? The second thing is to slowly realize that if we're laughing at him for still buying the line about duty and patriotism being more important than civil rights, and that if we're laughing at him for any of the things he's honest enough to admit being taken in by, then aren't we laughing at ourselves just as much because we've been taken in, as well?

The world Odell Deefus lives in is the same world we live in. While some of the characters are slightly cartoonish, they are very real representations of the types of people they represent in our world. Beneath the buffoonery reality is our world in all its stark ugliness; and in the end, not even Odell's delusions can protect him from it. To me this is satire at it's finest. Krol creates characters and situations that are nearly cartoon, but have enough reality in them for us to recognize them as our own world, while ensuring all the while we are laughing at ourselves without knowing it.

Not everyone is going to like Torsten Krol's depiction of life in America or enjoy the book much for that reason. Unfortunately it's not always a pleasant thing to look in a mirror and see yourself on a particularly bad day, and that's what Torsten Krol has done. He caught America in the midst of a very bad day.