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Chapter 17
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
It’s dark by the time the boys return to Herakles’s house. Geryon goes to Herakles’s mother’s room to use the phone to call home. When he gets there, he feels as though he has been there before and remembers his dream about the rapist the other night.
This is another odd moment that insinuates that perhaps Geryon really did sleepwalk to Herakles’s mother’s room the other night. There’s an undercurrent of violence and mystery to this surreal moment of recognition. Perhaps it symbolizes Geryon’s persistent fear that his monstrosity makes him capable of despicable acts of violence, a fear he exercises subconsciously by sleepwalking.
Themes
Geryon heads back downstairs without calling Geryon’s mother. He joins Herakles and Herakles’s grandmother on the front porch, where they are discussing Virginia Woolf and Freud. The grandmother tells a story about a small dog she had in Argentina who drowned. The phone rings, and Herakles goes inside to answer it.
Herakles’s grandmother and Herakles’s discussion of Freud is another indirect nod toward Geryon’s possible unconscious sleepwalking and the unconscious shame he bears of being a monster.
Themes
Geryon asks Herakles’s grandmother about what became of the Lava Man. Herakles’s grandmother explains that the man was severely burned and went on to tour the United States with the Barnum Circus. He would claim to be made of molten matter and had “returned from the core of the earth to tell you interior things.” Suddenly, Herakles returns from inside to tell Geryon that his mother has called and is angry and would like to talk to Geryon.
Lava Man is a compelling figure to Geryon because he has achieved what Geryon longs to but cannot: the ability “to tell [the world] interior things,” to successfully convey inside knowledge to the outside world and dissolve the boundary that separates himself from the world. As it stands, Geryon is too afraid of rejection and of letting known his monstrosity to effectively share his inside world with the outside. Lava Man is important, too, because he develops the relationship between volcanoes and the inside/outside world dichotomy that torments Geryon.
Themes
