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The End of the Beginning
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Life After Life, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Life, Reincarnation, and Alternate Possibilities
Fate vs. Choice
Family and Love
War and Death
Gender Roles and Expectations
Summary
Analysis
Ursula knows that Eva likes fashion and makeup and gossip. She goes to the skating rink with Eva and her sister. She is invited to dinner at the Brauns’ house. Ursula takes many photographs of her, and they spend evenings making albums together. Ursula also knows of Eva’s infatuation for her “older man.” All Eva wants is to be close to Hitler, and that’s all Ursula wants too. And so, as the men get used to having Eva around, they get used to having Ursula around as well.
Ursula uses the knowledge of her past lives in order to get close to Eva and eventually Hitler, in the hope that by choosing to kill Hitler rather than allowing history to take the course that it had, she can avert the global conflict. However, because Atkinson does not write past Ursula’s death, it is left ambiguous whether Ursula actually achieves her goal.
Themes
Ursula enters a café in Munich in December of 1930. Sitting at a table at the far end of the room is Hitler, surrounded by his henchmen, with pastries on the table. He motions for her to sit with him. She does so, and comments that it’s raining. She eats a piece of cake and quietly retrieves Hugh’s old revolver from her handbag. She levels it at Hitler’s chest, a move described as being “rehearsed a hundred times.” Around the table, several guns are pulled out and aimed at her. She says “For her” in German before pulling the trigger. Darkness falls.
Ursula makes the ultimate sacrifice in choosing to kill Hitler, knowing that she will be killed immediately by his henchmen. But her motivations remain perfectly clear: not only in trying to save the world, but also in protecting her family from the war. It is implied that the “her” to which she refers is Frieda, and that she is trying to save the daughter that she had in a previous life. While in this timeline it is a symbolic statement, as she doesn’t have a child in this timeline, it makes the point that she is trying to save her family and the little girls throughout the globe (like Pamela’s daughter, Sarah) who would have died as a result of the war.
Themes
