At the end of the novel, the author shocks readers by having Ingrid acquitted of her crimes. After all, in a morally fair world, it would only seem right that Ingrid would remain in jail, and Astrid would go on to live a happy life free of her mother. But the author seems to argue that this is not always the case. In fact, Ingrid is not the only supposed antagonist in the novel who seemingly escapes justice. Many of the people Astrid meets in her foster homes—from pedophiles to racists to neglectful husbands—seemingly escape justice, while all the woes of the world seem to befall Astrid at the drop of a hat. Heller’s character Yossarian from Catch-22 aptly sums up the hypocrisy and lack of justice in the world presented to a typical antihero:
	“How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls?” (Heller 414).
	Throughout the novel White Oleander there seems to be an underlying cynicism, a certain bitterness, a resignedness to one’s fate that is summarized in the following dialogue between Astrid and her friend Paul Trout:
“ ‘Do you ever want to go home?’ I asked Paul. 
He brushed an ash from my face. ‘It’s the century of the displaced person,’ he said. ‘You can never go home.’ ”
The dialogue between Astrid and Paul explains some of the motivating forces behind the actions of many antiheroes: a feeling of loneliness and of being displaced. In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver feels extremely out of place upon returning to England, because he had learned to view the world differently during his travels. He also feels misunderstood by his fellow humans, who do not seem interested in the wisdom he tries to impart upon them from his travels. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden feels perennially misunderstood by those around him. Astrid in White Oleander does not feel so much misunderstood as betrayed; although a misunderstanding between two people could be seen as a betrayal in and of itself. In a way, the mentality of an antihero is similar to that of a teenager who is just learning about how the world really works. If one considers “home” to be that place/state of mind in which one feels that everything will be okay (e.g. childhood) then in that respect, one can never go home, once one has discovered that in life, things do not always work out.
com:
“It also seems to me that in a particularly disillusioned age, with hardly a semblance of hope that our critical apparatus can make even a minor dent in the machinery of the technocracy and the consumer state, we're left with the death of certain kinds of hope or idealism, and also the death of religion as a sufficient provider of meaning.