First, under the themes of authorship and dissidence, it integrates his writing across several genres, providing a rounded assessment of his contribution to cultural debates in Spain since the sixties and arguing that resistance to repressive discourses characterizes his essays and autobiographies as much as his fiction.

Second, it revises the prevailing critical interpretation of Goytisolo's fiction by building on four premises: that his novels are less clearly oppositional than prevailing interpretations imply; that, in order to engage with discourses of identity, he employs an idiom which, contrary to his own statements, is not a poststructuralist autonomous world of words; that a textual practice grounded in the recognizable experience of post-Civil War Spain, rather than one which seeks out the realm of pure textuality, is essential to Goytisolo's subversive political intentions; and that the autobiographical element of much of his work constitutes a more complex narrative aesthetic than has been appreciated.

The book argues that if Goytisolo's work is interpreted as an ethical engagement with postmodernist theory, rather than as an illustration of it, then certain contradictions for which he has been criticized are seen in a new and valuable light.