One of the questions that arises out of this story is why Bill just doesn't simply walk away. But this question has no easy answer. There were cultural barriers that kept him in place - Bill Bonanno was part Sicilian, a product of a culture that valued family bond and loyalty unlike that of mainstream America of the 1960s. There were psychological barriers, too; Bill loved his father, making the idea of abandoning him hard to carry out. He also saw society and law as corrupt, and perhaps regarded the entire culture as corrupt as well. Then there was the problem of where to go, if he was somehow able to overcome all his mental barriers: without his family, Bill Bonanno would have been just another young man in a crowd. Though he had attended university, he failed to receive a degree and felt that he had somehow failed at the project of becoming fully integrated in the mainstream. If he did leave his family, he would be lost, living still as an outsider. Though it is easy to point out his flaws and to second guess his choices, to condemn Bill is to fail to comprehend the mystery of human existence and to overstate the power of the individual to make free choices in the face of culture, tradition and perception.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
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