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Chapter 35
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
In the first week of July, Varya and Ruby visit Gertie. Soon Ruby will begin her senior year of college at UCLA. Gertie asks Varya what she plans to do now—Varya has only told her that she made a critical mistake in the research and is leaving the Drake. She hasn’t told Gertie about Luke or that the two keep in touch. Luke occasionally sends pictures with his new girlfriend, Yuko, and once Varya sent Luke a jar of cherries.
The final chapter begins with family reconnecting in many different forms. Even though families can break apart because of conflict and disagreement, they can nonetheless remain connected to one another other because of their shared history and experiences.
Themes
Gertie says that Varya can’t sit around all day, eating pickles. Immediately Varya hears Klara, Daniel, and Simon’s voices in her head, making sarcastic retorts to Gertie’s comment. For so long, she suppressed their memories, but letting them in, she feels like the parts of her that she shut off are turning on again. She tells Gertie that she thinks she wants to teach. She taught a class while she was in graduate school, and even though it made her nervous, she found the “upturned faces” invigorating.
On the last night of Ruby’s visit, Ruby performs a magic show for the residents. While Ruby is setting up, Varya decides to tell Gertie about the fortune teller and the siblings’ conversation on the last night of Saul’s shiva—the last night the four of them were together. Gertie is aghast at how they could believe the fortune teller. Varya points out that Gertie is superstitious, reminding Gertie that she wanted to swing a live chicken around in the air after Saul died. Gertie says she didn’t want Varya to end up like her.
Gertie’s superstition implies that she, too, is worried about acting in accordance with fate. And yet at the same time, she acknowledges the potential harm in believing so fully in fate because it can deeply affect one’s actions, and Gertie hoped that her children wouldn’t share her superstition.
Themes
Varya knows that Gertie was nine when German forces invaded Hungary, and Gertie’s mother’s parents and siblings were sent to Auschwitz. The Shoah had diminished her belief in God, and looking to the future felt like tempting fate for her. In seeking to know the future, Varya and her siblings only solidified their fates. Gertie asks when the fortune teller said Varya would die. When Varya replies 88, Gertie asks what she’s so worried about.
In comparing herself to her mother, Varya recognizes that there is an appeal in not knowing one’s fate and in planning for a future that one may not achieve. Her parents, by contrast, felt that any plan for the future meant that they surely wouldn’t survive to see it, because of how much hardship they’d endured. Gertie also points out the irony in Varya thinking that she has to constantly worry when she was given a good fortune. Both women acknowledge that fate isn’t set in stone, and that knowing one’s fate can be harmful because it causes people to change their actions—often unnecessarily.
Themes
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At 7:30, the magic show starts. The dining hall is teeming, and when Ruby enters, the stage transforms. Ruby has an easy grin, and her confidence never wavers even when she makes a mistake. Ruby looks more comfortable than Klara ever did, and Varya wishes that Klara could have seen Ruby perform. The crowd loves her.
Varya acknowledges that Ruby has built on Klara’s legacy in so many ways—not only in continuing Klara’s genes, but also in making Klara’s performance better because Ruby displays a confidence that Klara never truly had.
Themes
After the show, Ruby wheels Gertie back to her room. Varya knows that stopping aging is unrealistic, but still she wants to keep Gertie around as long as possible. Soon, Ruby will be learning how to perform surgery or deliver a child. Raj asks why she wants to be a doctor when she brings people so much joy, but Ruby knows that magic is only one way to keep people alive. When Ruby was little, Raj told her Klara’s mantra, and she repeats it every time she performs. Before the show at the home, she stood behind the makeshift curtain and repeated “I love you all” before stepping through it to join them.
Ruby understands the benefit that magic can provide for people, just as her mother did, but she also knows that there are other ways to improve people’s lives. Ending the novel with Klara’s mantra illustrates that even if Ruby isn’t always going to carry on Klara’s legacy of magic, she does want to provide people with meaning and a sense of possibility, just as all four of the Gold siblings did.
Themes
