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Chapter 25
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
The airplane flies through the clouds. Geryon remembers seeing a dog seized by rabies, its body jerking around on the ground. Geryon had walked away when the owner had placed a gun to the dog’s head, though now, “he wished he had stayed to see it go free.” Geryon reads about harpoons made of whale skulls from the beaches of Tierra del Fuego. He reads about the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego, the Yamana, whose name is a noun that means “people not animals,” and a verb, “to live, breathe, be happy, recover from sickness, become sane.” The Yamanas’ poverty made Darwin think they were uncivilized and not worth studying, but they had 15 words for clouds. Today, the Yamana are extinct, their population eviscerated by measles.
Geryon’s memory about the rabid dog is dark and reflects his current mental state. He appears to equate freedom with death, his desire to “stay[] to see it go free” referring to death as freedom. Geryon has mentioned having a dog several times throughout the book, yet he always misremembers details about it, such as incorrectly thinking the dog is still alive when it is not. Carson’s translation of Geryoneis asserts that Herakles killed Geryon’s dog. Perhaps the repeated references to a dog serve to ground Carson’s retelling of the story in its mythological origins.
Themes
The video screen in front of Geryon shows that the plane will arrive at Geryon’s layaway in Bermuda at 10 minutes to 2:00. Geryon thinks about how much he fears time. He returns to his guide book and reads about harpoons the Yamana would make from whale jaw bones. Geryon considers how the only certainty of someone who “moves through time” is that, eventually, “like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.” Geryon falls asleep.
Geryon’s harpoon metaphor further develops the thesis that his anxieties about time are tied to a fear of being out of control. No matter how he throws the harpoon or conducts his life, the final destinations of the harpoon and himself remain the same: the harpoon crashes onto the beach, and life ends in death.
Themes
