Speaking of the 'quest romance' as breaking from traditional, hierarchical framework (in life and in literature) and as aspiring to "freedom" or "liberation" – as is done in 'American Quest Romance as Counter-Traditional Genre' – is indeed a very original and also a tempting way to look at thing, but it is nevertheless problematic and perhaps even misleading. The act of going out on a quest and leaving behind the suffocating traditional society, urging him to marry and reproduce, is seen – for the man – as an act of "choice" and "escape". The juxtaposition of those two terms is in itself indicative of the problem: if it is a "choice", an exercise of free will – how come it is an "escape", something you do for lack of any other option?

The writer holds the women-free fictional worlds in the four quest romances he examines, to be a progressive suggestion of a world liberated from the pressing demand to get married and fulfill the traditional role prescribed for men: reproducing and providing.

Furthermore, the writer claims that the liberation from the traditional, inherently hierarchical institution of matrimony is attained by an alternative central to the romances themes: the intimate male bonding.

But it is hard to subscribe to this viewpoint. Firstly, one may seriously doubt whether the quest is a true "liberation" from the traditional manly roles, or a temporary and not very successive "escape" from it, as is evidenced from Ahab's emotional confession to Starbuck, about him deserting his wretched young wife. Why, this is not a free man, but a guilty ridden one indeed!

Secondly, the male-bonding argument isn't flawless as well. To establish it, the writer claims that a homosocial connection is by definition a more egalitarian one, free from the hierarchy inherent to the matrimonial connection. But this argument ignores the fact that the specific male relationships described in the quest romances are highly and emphatically hierarchical: white Ishmael and savage Queequeg in Moby Dick; white Huck and black Jim in Huckleberry Finn; and the powerful manly Wolf Larsen versus the physically weak and feminine Humphrey in The Sea Wolf