An aspect of criticism is to coax a series of abstractions from a text that is brave enough to be ambiguous about them. Whether these abstractions help or hinder our understanding of the work depends mostly on the type of the text and its aims. A book that is about 'strife in India and its uncompromising effect on its subjects', for example, may in fact be literal enough that any difficulty in its interpretation can be traced directly to the authorial source; perhaps, we are warranted in feeling, the author does not yet control his themes well enough to enable him to be clearer about his meaning. Another problem with such thematically obvious writing is its tendency to degenerate into little more than a mouthpiece for its author's strident declarations; books like The White Tiger fall into this broad category, where characters are trodden upon in order to voice the apparently more urgent contentions of their creator (that in the case of The White Tiger these contentions are ordinary enough to be meaningless is not itself a valid criticism, because the first responsibility of such 'social-message' novels is to express such ordinary truths forcefully enough that any doubts about their ordinariness disappear. ). Such works are usually immune to criticism precisely because their so-called 'social message' is dire enough and weighty enough to expel any expectations of literariness. Implicit to such an appraisal is the thesis that the author is in a position to 'say something important', a position that we the 'common readers' can never obtain simply by the trivial tautology that we do not currently occupy it. This thesis is not unlike a potential argument for God, not unlike an argument for a preferred frame of reference that supersedes others, and contradicts rather than subverts the classical aims of literature. Novels like TWT and obviously interventional works like The Fountainhead cannot be subjected to any degree of meaningful discussion without first abandoning their 'social messages', and agreeing that such messages cannot be conflated with their thematic content. The question is then whether they are in fact possessed of themes that can be annotated and meaningfully pointed to, and characters that reflect a certain aspect of reality that is tied with these themes.