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Chapter 46
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
Herakles, Geryon, and Ancash spent the day fighting but now roam the streets of Jucu on this cold, dark night. They turn a corner and reach their destination: “Volcano in a wall.” They watch men form balls of dough and place them into holes in the slope of the volcano. Geryon falls behind Herakles and Geryon. Ancash gestures toward the fire. Herakles responds, “beautiful,” thinking Ancash refers to some passing men. Geryon watches the fire and thinks that they are “neighbors of fire” and that “time is rushing toward them” as they have “immortality on their faces, night on their back.”
This is the phenomenon the soldiers mentioned in Chapter XLIII: bakers cooking bread in the slope of the active volcano. Herakles’s mistake in thinking Ancash is calling the passing men beautiful further highlights his superficiality. Geryon’s final reflection, that he, Ancash, and Herakles are “neighbors of fire,” is a meditation on the themes explored in the Dickinson poem. He sees “immortality” and “beauty” in the way he and his “neighbors of fire” reflect that beauty back toward each other. The previous chapter featured Geryon experiencing individual self-affirmation. But in the end, he realizes that in order to truly feel secure, he also needs other people to fully know and accept him for who he is.
Themes
