When both characters leave the hospital together, like mother and baby leaving a maternity ward, their coming-of-age journey begins.
We know that she's kind and gentle because of how she treats the patients, even if her interactions with the staff suggest juvenile tendencies. By seeing her interactions with the hospital staff and patients, we get to understand Jill's character right away. We are also introduced to Jill at Bethesda Hospital. Mike gets his first taste of confinement at Bethesda (see the " Freedom and Confinement" section under Themes for more on that). Even though hospitals are meant to help and heal their patients, they can also be a place where individual liberty is revoked in the pursuit of said health. Mike spends his first days on Earth in this hospital, and it acts more as a prison than a place to rest up. Could it get any more confusing than that? Sure, if we had the time-traveling car from Back to the Future, but where are we going to find one of those? Bethesda Hospital
In this case, the future is a metaphor for the past. It can be helpful to remember what Ursula Le Guin said in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness: "science fiction isn't about the future Science fiction is metaphor" ( Source, 27). You know, a world like one from a Norman Rockwell painting or The Andy Griffith Show.
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That means that this world still embodies a religious, social, and moral code reminiscent of a conservative America that had yet to be drastically shaped by the 1960s, civil rights, or MTV. Just like the tech, Heinlein constructs the cultural morals and social mores of his future world by drawing from the morals and mores of what would have been his world, i.e., America of the late 1950s. Yet, nothing resembling the Internet exists, all phones are land-lined, and one gets the sneaking suspicion that dot printers still rule the day. The taxis fly and are driven by robots, and men have created spaceships that travel to Mars. This whole past's future conundrum gives the novel's world a sort of retro vibe. Stranger in a Strange Land takes place in the future, but it's the future as imagined in the 1950s.
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