The book can be read as the spiritual autobiography of an epic hero who emphatically disavows his heroic role, seeing his whole life as a series of acts of the ego. The demythologizing which Bhisma thus starts with himself goes deeper and touches the very core of the ancient epic, raising many questions pertinent to the tradition itself, and finally, turns the narrative into a vision, inducing a startlingly new and heightened awareness of what it is to be a man.
