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Appendix B
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Autobiography of Red, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Creativity
Communication and Mystery
Time
Self and World
Summary
Analysis
Appendix C consists of a list of 21 opposing possibilities for details associated with Stesichoros’s rumored blinding. For example, 1. reads, “Either Stesichoros was a blind man or he was not.” 2. states that either Stesichoros’s blindness was temporary or permanent. Other opposing possibilities Appendix C raises are whether or not Helen caused Stesichoros’s blindness, whether or not Helen’s actions were justified, and whether or not Stesichoros made slanderous claims about Helen’s sexual misconduct.
The either/or statements Carson presents in Appendix C are called disjunctive syllogisms. In classical logic, disjunctive syllogisms are a type of argument in which one infers the truth of one statement by inferring the falsehood of an opposing statement. In Carson’s first disjunctive syllogism, for example, if one infers that Stesichoros was not not a blind man, one then can infer that he was a blind man. The inference that Stesichoros was blind allows Carson to make an inference about the second disjunctive syllogism, and that inference informs the following syllogism, and so on, through the rest of the sequence.
Themes
Midway through the list, Carson considers whether the rumors about Stesichoros are lies. If this is the case, she suggests, “we are now in reverse” in our reasoning, which will bring us back to the beginning of our inquiry, where we may meet Stesichoros. The list continues to present opposing options. For example, Carson states that if we meet Stesichoros, we will either ask him about Helen, or we will remain silent. If we choose to ask, Stesichoros will either lie or tell the truth, and we will either believe or doubt him. If Stesichoros admits to lying, his admission will either go unnoticed or attract Helen’s attention.
Carson throws a wrench in the conventional logic she initially presented by making an inference about the equal likelihood of either option being a lie, creating a system in which inferring deception leads the reader backward until they know nothing about Stesichoros, rather than forward toward a fixed answer about Stesichoros’s blindness. In so doing, Carson divorces certainty from truth and “detach[ing] being,” much as she claims Stesichoros has done with adjectives. In the absence of certainty, reality becomes tenuous and unstable rather than fixed and reassuring. This is the type of thinking Carson asks her reader to have while reading Autobiography of Red.
Themes
