In a 2007 interview McCarthy claimed one of the main themes pervading his work to be that of repetition and duplication. The repetition in "Remainder" takes the form of re-enactments of events carried out by the wealthy post-traumatic hero in a process that some critics (such as Joyce Carol Oates in the "New York Review of Books") have seen as allegory for art itself. In "Men in Space" it takes the form of duplication of an artwork, and a set of patterns repeating over several centuries. In McCarthy's art projects it has taken the form of repeating sets of messages over radio in a homage to Jean Cocteau's "Orphée". Boyd Tonkin, in his "Independent" profile on McCarthy, picks up on the notion that literature itself is a series of repetitions and duplications.