There are two serious images of fatherhood that contend with each other in this book. Broadly, one could call them physical and spiritual fatherhood. Together, they form a portrait for patriarchal authority, both in a healthy and in a toxic way. After discerning for himself what he thinks of father, David decides to study religion more because the legitimacy of his father's authority is dubious to the boy. The boy thought they were doing just fine without him, but now that the toxic father is home, David must work to attain peace that used to come naturally.
The inciting incident of the novel is therefore the introduction of patriarchy into David's young mind. The father represents a forgotten force now back from chaos, like a ghost or something. David goes through a season of adjustment, learning his father and navigating that strangely intimate relationship one new day at a time. Through time, he realizes that the family is not as healthy as he had hoped it would be. David decides to think for himself by preferring an authority outside the four walls of his home.
David's involvement with religion takes him down a lot of various trials and tribulations, the peaks of which are David's encounter with death and his discovery that there are unhealthy aspects of religion as well. The unhealthy aspects of religion are the in-fighting, the tendency to dehumanize the "other," and the serious issue of legitimacy in the Jewish community. This membership-by-blood is where the corrupt father of David's own home life coincides with his experience of religion. What he discovers in the end is pity. He says the feeling could be called "sleep," perhaps because of the dreamlike feeling of truly empathizing with someone else.
