The funeral captures the alluring, fascinating, and frustrating sides of Robert’s character. He’s an incredibly charismatic, brilliant, likeable guy, and yet he makes many frustrating and foolish decisions. It would be easy to say that Robert is the victim of poverty, oppression, and circumstance—and it would be equally easy to say that Robert brought this on himself. The truth, as Hobbs has tried to suggest over the course of his book, is probably somewhere in between. Oswaldo’s pithy statement is thus a remarkably concise description of Robert’s multifaceted character.