The feeling of being incapable of controlling your own life and general uselessness make people want to escape the world around them. In spite of the feeling that they possess some creative force, they still feel they waste their time and lives.

As she tries to cope with the changes in Yugoslav rural life brought about by increasing modernization, the Widow Karolina wishes she had become a mother. As difficult as things are for her, they are nonetheless much more difficult for her more-conservative and less-thoughtful neighbors.