“‘Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?’ she was saying.”

April is on stage, reciting her character’s (Gabby Maple) line from The Petrified Forest. Though it isn’t technically April Wheeler asking the question, her voice and her face penetrate the minds of the male audience, particularly her husband’s, and their friend Shep Campbell’s. Her line thus poses a rhetorical question that runs throughout the novel, a question that is not only in the minds of Frank and Shep but also the reader. Everyone wants to be loved by April, but her love comes at a price. She does not want to be contained within the limiting controls of 1950s conformist society; rather, she needs a certain amount of freedom and self-determination, as much as the men do.

“The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

Frank and April are driving home from the play. Frank is carrying on an inner monologue through the narrator, a literary technique known as free indirect speech/discourse. In essence, the line implores Frank and April to remember that though they must live in the suburbs and among the bourgeois, they do not have to conform and become a part thereof.