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Chapter 33
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in America Is in the Heart, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Beauty in Despair
Race and American Identity
Education vs. Ignorance
Poverty
Summary
Analysis
Carlos undergoes more operations to stop the spread of tuberculosis into his lungs. He loses all of the ribs on his left side, but the doctor tells him he will live longer than initially thought. The nurses transfer him into a smaller ward with a Mexican man who dies the morning after a sexual encounter with his visiting wife. Carlos then goes back to the larger ward and watches WPA workers dig holes in the lawn to keep busy.
Even amid visits with friends and long periods spent immersed in books, Carlos cannot escape the reality that his disease will kill him sooner or later. The daily sight of suffering and death among the other hospital patients compounds his anxiety about his own mortality.
Themes
Carlos passes his days in the hospital watching visiting musicians and singers, reading books, and writing poetry. Revolutionary Russian writers such as Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy particularly inspire him about the power of human potential. He also discovers American writers such as Mark Twain. By reading great authors’ books, Carlos creates “a spiritual kinship with other men who had pondered over the miseries of their countries.”
In order to fulfill a lifelong desire to become an educated person, Carlos turns his hospital into a school. He acts as both student and teacher, and recreates the camaraderie of schoolmates by imagining the great authors he reads as his intellectual peers. Carlos’s determination to learn as much as he can in the time he has left shows how education can always be an inspiring force, no matter how dark the circumstances.
Themes
