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Chapter 34
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
Geryon sits between Herakles and Ancash on the plane to Peru and feels aroused. He hadn’t realized that the book he bought in the airport in Buenos Aires was pornographic. Worse, he feels ashamed to feel aroused by sentences about a woman named Gladys. Herakles and Ancash both appear to be asleep. Geryon tosses the book aside and decides to pretend to be asleep so he can rest his head on Herakles’s shoulder. Suddenly, he feels Herakles’s hand on his thigh, making its way to his zipper. He presses his mouth against Herakles’s and gives in to him. “Gladys!” he thinks.
Geryon is so lacking in a fixed, stable identity that his erotic responses aren’t even his own. He feels aroused by forces that act on him and then goes along with them, lacking the agency to turn them away because he’s so lonely.
Themes
