Autobiography of Red

by

Anne Carson

Identity and Creativity Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Identity and Creativity Theme Icon
Communication and Mystery Theme Icon
Time Theme Icon
Self and World Theme Icon
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 Theme Icon

As its title suggests, Autobiography of Red is a book that deals with the formation of identity. Geryon, the protagonist, begins constructing his autobiography even before he learns to write, fashioning a sculpture out of a cigarette glued to a tomato in an attempt at self-expression. As Geryon grows older, his preferred tool for creative self-expression becomes a camera, and his autobiography takes the form of a photographic essay. Geryon’s ongoing attempts at identity formation are artistic and interpretive. He is an artist rather than a documentarian. As such, his autobiography becomes a personal, subjective meditation on his experiences rather than a presentation of stable, objective, and unchanging facts. In this way, the novel suggests that a person’s identity rests in their subjective, often creative interpretations of their life’s experiences and their attempt to fashion those interpretations into a coherent whole.

The novel further emphasizes this idea in its formal structure as well. Autobiography of Red is Carson’s retelling of the Greek myth of Geryon. The book opens with an essay and appendices concerning the Greek poet Stesichoros’s adaptation of the myth of Geryon in his lyric poem Geryoneis, which serves as Carson’s most direct inspiration. Carson’s retelling of the surviving fragments of Stesichoros’s poem takes even further interpretive license, turning an ancient lyric poem into a coming-of-age story about a young, red-winged monster boy growing up in 20th-century North America. These introductory materials blend genres of poetry, verse, and essay into a genre-bending, innovative work. The creativity of this compositional choice, combined with Geryon's creative endeavor of constructing his autobiography, the work’s central focus, highlights creativity and self-fashioning’s central role in the construction of identity. 

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Identity and Creativity Quotes in Autobiography of Red

Below you will find the important quotes in Autobiography of Red related to the theme of Identity and Creativity.
Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make? Quotes

Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Related Characters: Geryon, Stesichoros
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches. Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver.

Related Characters: Geryon, Stesichoros
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

Once she said the meaning
it would stay.

Related Characters: Geryon, Geryon’s Mother, Geryon’s Brother, Geryon’s Grandmother
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

Inside is mine, he thought.

Related Characters: Geryon (speaker), Geryon’s Brother, Geryon’s Grandmother
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.

Related Characters: Geryon, Herakles, Geryon’s Mother
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved.

Related Characters: Geryon, Herakles, Geryon’s Mother
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said.
Very likely, said Geryon.

Related Characters: Geryon (speaker), Herakles’s Grandmother (speaker), Herakles
Related Symbols: Volcano 
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

All your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.

Related Characters: Herakles (speaker), Geryon
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things

Related Characters: Herakles’s Grandmother (speaker), Lava Man (speaker), Geryon, Ancash
Related Symbols: Wings , Volcano 
Page Number: 59
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

Related Characters: Geryon, Herakles
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

How do you think it feels
growing up in a house full
of empty fruit bowls? His voice was high.
His eyes met hers and they began
to laugh. They laughed
until tears ran down. Then they sat quiet. Drifted back
to opposite walls.

Related Characters: Geryon (speaker), Herakles, Geryon’s Mother, Geryon’s Brother
Page Number: 68-69
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.

Related Characters: Geryon, Herakles, Geryon’s Brother
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:

Yellow? said Geryon and he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams
he doesn’t know me at all! Yellow!

Related Characters: Geryon (speaker), Herakles
Related Symbols: Red, Wings
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

Related Characters: Geryon
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

There is no person without a world.

Related Characters: Geryon, Geryon’s Brother
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:

It was not the fear of ridicule,
to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,
but this blank desertion of his own mind
that threw him into despair.

Related Characters: Geryon
Related Symbols: Red, Wings
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

[…] Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction.
Just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.

Related Characters: The Yellowbeard (speaker), Geryon
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 30 Quotes

It is
because of her I began to notice moments of death. Children make you see distances.

Related Characters: Lazer (speaker), Geryon, Herakles’s Grandmother
Related Symbols: Volcano 
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

You can’t be alive and think about nothing.

Related Characters: Geryon (speaker), Tango Singer
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

“…I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.”

Related Characters: Geryon, Ancash
Related Symbols: Wings , Red
Page Number: 105
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 37 Quotes

I’m a master of monsters aren’t I?

Related Characters: Herakles (speaker), Geryon, Ancash
Related Symbols: Wings
Page Number: 129
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 38 Quotes

What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.

Related Characters: Geryon, Herakles, Ancash, Ancash’s Mother
Related Symbols: Volcano 
Page Number: 132
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 39 Quotes

A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has effects
no one can calculate in advance.

Related Characters: Geryon, Herakles, Ancash, Ancash’s Mother
Related Symbols: Volcano 
Page Number: 135
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 45 Quotes

There is one thing I want from you.
Tell me.
Want to see you use those wings.

Related Characters: Geryon (speaker), Ancash (speaker), Herakles
Related Symbols: Wings , Volcano 
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 46 Quotes

This is for Ancash, he calls to the earth diminishing below. This is a memory of our
beauty.

Related Characters: Geryon (speaker), Herakles, Ancash
Related Symbols: Red, Wings , Volcano 
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 47 Quotes

We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.

Related Characters: Geryon (speaker), Herakles, Ancash, Stesichoros
Related Symbols: Wings , Volcano 
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis: