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Chapter 19
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
Geryon drifts in and out of sleep as he, Herakles, and Herakles’s grandmother drive to the volcano. Herakles and his grandmother are talking about feminism and life in Hades. Geryon thinks about what he’s read about volcanoes in the encyclopedia.
Geryon tries to distract himself with mindless facts about volcanoes to forget his misery. Static, reliable notions of truth he reads in the encyclopedia ground him when his entire life is falling apart in the aftermath of the breakup.
Themes
They reach the volcano and get out of the car. The landscape around them is entirely bare. Herakles’s grandmother explains that the lava dome is mostly glass, or rhyolite obsidian. She thinks it’s “beautiful,” and “has a kind of pulse as you look at it.” She also explains that the rubble is made by the breakage that occurs when the glass chills at a fast rate. Herakles and his grandmother sing “Joy to the World” on the drive down, but Geryon remains silent.
Herakles’s grandmother’s observation that the ground “has a kind of pulse” points to the theme of time. Nature lives in time, in an ever forward-moving “pulse” that continues onward with or without humanity’s interference. When Geryon doesn’t join in on Herakles and his grandmother’s song, it reflects Geryon’s continued alienation. He no longer feels that he is a part of their world after the breakup.
Themes
