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Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Immortalists, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Choice
Family and Shared History
Obsession
Death, Meaning, and Legacy
Surviving vs. Living
Magic, Religion, Dance, and Possibility
Summary
Analysis
Klara and Raj get an audition at The Mirage’s theater. As they perform the Proteus Cabinet, Second Sight, and the Jaws of Life, the executives look bored. They ask Klara if she has any other tricks, and Klara feels that they have failed. But then she remembers Ilya’s box and how she always preferred sleight of hand tricks. Klara takes out the box and performs two card tricks, including a particularly difficult one called Raise Rise. She asks one man to sign a card and put it in the middle of the deck, but several times in a row she is able to pull the card off the top of the pile. Klara hasn’t practiced in years, and she’s amazed that she’s able to do it. She feels like something is helping her.
Klara’s audition adds to the idea that magic can provide alternative explanations for logic and fact. Klara doesn’t fully understand how she is pulling off her old tricks given the fact that she hasn’t performed them in a long time. In thinking that something outside of her control is helping her, Klara starts to believe in her own magic, defying logic and enabling her to succeed. Thus, Klara finds magic even in her own illusions, despite knowing the actual mechanics of her tricks.
Themes
Klara then executes another trick with coins. She shows her hand to be empty before making a quarter appear between her fingers, from the man’s collar, shirt pocket, and ears, and even several from her mouth when she coughs. When she does this, another executive finally looks up from his pager.
Klara’s intimate magic, which relies on cleverness rather than the awe of her bigger tricks, is what gets the executives’ attention. This affirms Klara’s own philosophy of magic—that spectacle isn’t always important to making people believe in magic and wonder.
Themes
Klara addresses the man who looked up, noting that he is religious because of the cross he wears. She explains that her father Saul was religious as well, and she often thought that magic and religion were opposed. But she realized that they believed in the same thing: that God and magic are “a placeholder for what we don’t know. A space where the impossible becomes possible.”
Here Klara directly relates her magic to religion, illustrating that one of the commonalities between them is that they provide supernatural explanations for the mysteries of the world and expand a person’s sense of possibility.
Themes
As Klara speaks, she retrieves a cup and ball, making the ball vanish from her fist and appear underneath the cup. She explains that magic doesn’t shatter a person’s worldview, it fills in reality’s holes. She says that it takes magic to reveal how inadequate reality is. On this final point, she puts the cup over the ball and makes a full, perfect strawberry appear in her fist. The men are stunned, and Raj starts to clap. The man with the cross asks when she can start. They agree to set opening night in four months.
Klara’s act continues to explore the appeal of magic. Where most people believe that magic is meant to deceive or detract from reality, Klara again emphasizes that magic simply provides alternate explanations for reality, and the strawberry represents this concept. The executives are stunned at seeing the strawberry, having no idea where it could have come from. That this is what changes the producers’ mind about hiring Klara illustrates how appealing it is to buy into a sense of wonder.
Themes
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When they leave the theater, Raj is amazed. He says she doesn’t know how she pulled off the trick with the strawberry. Klara says she doesn’t know either—she’s never seen it before and has no idea where it came from. Klara wonders if her blackouts have come back, but even so she doesn’t drive the rental car and there’s no grocery store nearby, so it’s still not clear where the strawberry could have come from. Raj is taken aback, asking if she believes in her own tricks. She realizes that he’s afraid of her.
The fact that not even Klara knows where the strawberry came from invites readers to consider their own perspective on magic. They could buy into Klara’s more logical explanation that perhaps her blackouts have returned, or they could believe that Klara really was aided by magic, as she concludes herself.
Themes
