4 ideas
The Arnewi's cistern is infested with frogs, and taboo forbids them from touching the water, so their cattle are dying of thirst. Henderson builds a homemade bomb to kill the frogs, and the explosion blows out the cistern wall and drains the tribe's entire water supply. His urge to be useful, acted on without restraint or deference to local knowledge, turns a solvable problem into a catastrophe.
Henderson's heart keeps crying 'I want, I want' but never says what it wants, and wealth, marriage, war service and pig farming all fail to quiet it. The novel treats this voice as the craving itself, one that attaches to whatever object is at hand. So satisfying any particular desire cannot end it, and only changing the person doing the wanting can.
The Arnewi queen Willatale reads Henderson and names what drives him: grun-tu-molani, 'man want to live.' Seen this way, his clumsiness, rages and overreaching are misdirected expressions of a wish to be fully alive, not simple faults. That changes the question from how to suppress his excess to how to aim it.
King Dahfu argues that body and imagination shape each other, so a person's physical postures and habits both express and fix their character. He has Henderson crouch and roar like a lioness so that absorbing the animal's unselfconscious presence can dissolve his fear and self-loathing. The claim is that deliberately changing outward behavior can rebuild the inner self.