In When Jonathan Dies, Tony Duvert shows the annulment of the child's right to autonomy, to his words, to his pleasures. The child serves as a pretext for the confrontations between the mother and the father, and is a trophy that the grandmother would win from the daughter to show her moral superiority. Furthermore, she is also the prey of the old neighbor who envies the intoxicating look with which she enjoys life. Thus, Duvert delivers a text in which he draws the strained relationship between adults and children: or, as the critic and writer René de Ceccatty writes, the "irresponsible coalition of parents with educators" for whom the child is a doll, a thing. In the novel we can read: “The mother felt a definitive right over her son, which she used according to her whims and which authorized all contradictions. Her son served as his reserve humanity when she had nothing else. He was a doll with which the gestures that will be executed later with less insignificant prey are practiced ”.

In his novel, When Jonathan Dies, Tony Duvert outlines, through the erotic relationship between a boy and a young painter, what his project was: to create a civilization that preserves the child's right to his integrity. Publishing this book today obeys a fundamental principle: to make known a literature that probes the darkest areas of man; a literature that accounts for the multiple dimensions of the human, even if they are the most ominous.