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Ashes
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ashes, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Communication and Misunderstanding
“Ashes” follows 35-year-old Chris as he accompanies his mother to scatter his recently deceased father’s ashes on a lake—the same lake where Chris camped with his father as a child. On the way there, Chris is annoyed by his mother’s attempts to sugarcoat and idealize both her marriage and Chris’s relationship with his father. In contrast to his mother, he reflects on times throughout his life when his parents failed to support or…
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Grief and Memory
As Chris drives his mother to a lake where they plan to scatter his later father, Alan’s, ashes, he endures her constant chatter about her marriage to Alan, as well as Alan and Chris’s relationship. The rosy way she portrays these memories, Chris thinks, is revisionist to the point of being offensive. He recognizes, though, that this is a product of his mother’s grief: in order to come to terms with her husband’s death…
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Sexuality, Gender, and Parental Expectations
The central conflict of “Ashes” is that between Chris, a 35-year-old gay man, and his parents. His mother and his late father wanted their son to look, act, and live his life in a stereotypically masculine way. But throughout his childhood, they treated Chris as if something was wrong with him—he felt “an obscure sense that he’d failed some test,” even though his parents never fully articulated their disapproval of his gender expression and…
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