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Chapter 26
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dracula, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Writing, Journaling, and Messaging
Illness, Madness, and Confinement
Christianity, Science, and the Occult
Romantic Love, Seduction, and Sexual Purity
Life, Death, and the Un-Dead
Summary
Analysis
Harker writes a closing note to the account of Dracula, seven years after Dracula's final death. Mina and Harker now have a child, named Quincey, who was born on the anniversary of Morris's death. Seven years later, Mina, Harker, and young Quincey traveled to Transylvania, and Mina and Harker were shocked both by the beauty of the country and by the memory of what had happened there.
A brief epilogue. New family units have been created: Mina and Harker have a child, and both Seward and Arthur marry. Thus, not only has Dracula been destroyed, but from his destruction new bonds of love and family are finally formed. Further, Morris has been "reborn" in a natural way: he died, and those who loved him named a new baby after him.
Themes
Literary Devices
Quiz
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Back home, Harker and Mina thought of Arthur and Seward, both happily married. As Harker and Mina go over the documents comprising the account of Dracula, they think of Van Helsing's words, uttered to them recently—that although the documents were assembled as proof of Dracula's existence, and of his death, they still remain accounts, and would have to be verified by some other means. But Van Helsing says that, of course, Quincy, Harker and Mina's son, will know how courageous his mother and father were, and how many men banded together to protect Mina from harm, to restore her good name, and to hunt Dracula until his soul might be freed. Harker ends the account here.
Another important point. Van Helsing realizes, at this juncture, that there is nothing to prevent anyone reading this account from considering the entire thing fiction. Of course, the novel is fiction, and here Bram Stoker has engaged in another bit of meta-narrative play which is more often associate with modernist and postmodern texts. Stoker seems to acknowledge in his novel the tenuous border between fact and fiction that exists in all accounts of events. And Harker and Mina know that, in order to believe in the story of Dracula, one must believe, more generally, that there are in life some events that are strange, beyond our experience or rational comprehension, and yet inevitably true.
Themes
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