According to the French critic w:fr:Patrick Besnier, ( introducing a 1990 edition of the novel), Loti's book is one " shaped by the rapports between father and son - their non-existence, their impossibility.."
In Ramuntcho the Basque country is presented as a quasi-paradisiacal land. Time and history do not weigh upon this Arcadie, the slow passage of days and months is simply a succession of feast days and of rejoicing. The outside world doesn't intrude, even military service is left hazy - the reader learns only that Ramuntcho departs for 'a southern land.' From this Basque paradise, Ramuntcho is going to be excluded; the novel is the story of a fall, and of an exile from Eden. Unwilling at first to do his military service ;" Non, je peux ne pas le faire, mon service! je suis Guipuzcoan, moi, comme ma mère;...Français ou Espagnol, moi, ça m'est égal.. " Yet he does his service, to please Gracieuse, and he chooses a nationality , French. To the lack of differentiation French/Spanish, other themes of borders emerge - for example the border between adulthood and adolescence. According to Besnier, Loti, in his Basque life, lived protected from the realities and cruelties of existence, and in a state of perpetual adolescence. In this happy land, it seems only games and pleasures exist, the two principal occupations being pelota and dancing, and the only 'work' really evoked, smuggling, which itself is a kind of game between police and thieves. When Ramuntcho returns, having symbolically exchanged the 'pantalon rouge' of the military, for the 'tenues légères' of the players of pelota, he is changed. Even those amongst his comrades who have become fathers, continue to participate in their world as before, but not Ramuntcho. "
The sentiment of exclusion from paradise which begins for the hero was one Loti knew. Lost childhood obsessed the writer, he was an exile in the world of adults where he would never truly integrate himself, neither able to take it seriously, nor to conquer the anxiety which it inspired in him. He wanted to ensorcerize it..to live in universe of a manufactured adolescence..[witness] his celebrated taste for dressing up and costume balls, disguising reality, of which so many photographs give proof - Loti as a Pharoah, Loti as Louis XI, Loti as a berber. " [3] "Time and again in his life Loti travels to a land of possible salvation, that he thinks might know the secret of primitive innocence - time and again follows disillusion, and the traveller understands that, far from him being saved, rather he has brought contagion ('progress', 'civilization') to the dreamed of paradise." [4]