The brief scene in which Jack Burden observes the prefrontal lobectomy performed by his friend Adam Stanton is crucial to the novel's meaning, allowing Warren an opportunity to gather economically together most of the major themes of the novel. On one level Warren intends an analogy between Jack Burden and the anesthetized patient on the table who is in a very real sense Jack's double, a grotesque reflection of certain crucial aspects of his own character. And by forcing the confrontation, Warren achieves in a brilliant stroke a parody of portions of the novel's larger action, allowing himself the opportunity to recapture in symbolic form Jack's life and attitudes to date while simultaneously offering implicit criticism of that life and those attitudes. Warren further utilizes the scene to illuminate the meaning of Jack's flight West and the subsequent adoption of the mechanistic theory of the Great Twitch. In addition, the scene, by the nature of the operation, is a symbolic representation of the theme of division so pervasive throughout the book and may be viewed in retrospect as one step toward the resolution of this conflict.