Tom is an orphan, brought up by an uncaring relative after the death of his parents. He has been alone for many years and has always felt himself to be an outsider, longing for acceptance. Throughout the novel, Tom strives for insider status, but it continually evades him.

One reason that Tom always remains on the outside is that he disdains every group that includes him. Groucho Marx famously said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” Tom seems to agree with this notion, as he disdains his friends in New York. But when he goes overseas, his same standards apply. When he gains popularity in Venice, he looks down on everyone there—even as he has gained insider status, he places himself on the outside. When he stumbles into a cocktail party, Tom finds himself in the company of titled Europeans, and yet he is not impressed: “He often asked people to repeat what they had said. He was terribly bored. But he could use them, he thought, to practice on” (206). Even when he is in danger of being caught by the police, he never seriously considers leaving Europe, just because of his standards: “he could never acquire the circle of friends—not unless he went to Istanbul or Ceylon, and what was the use of acquiring the kind of people he would meet in those places?” (176) He longs to be an insider but makes it nearly impossible for himself to achieve that status.