Life After Life Themes

Life After Life follows protagonist Ursula Todd through a variety of lives in twentieth-century Britain. Each chapter describes an alternative path that Ursula’s life could follow, ending with her (often premature) death. In some versions of Ursula’s story, Atkinson provides her main character with slightly different circumstances, which adjust the trajectory of her life. In other versions, Ursula has pangs of “déjà vu,” which lead her to try to avert the disaster that led to…

As Ursula experiences a multitude of lives, each version of her life is slightly (or sometimes vastly) different. Arguments begin to emerge in the novel about fate and choice, as certain details or actions that Atkinson includes have large ramifications on Ursula’s life while some circumstances remain relatively unchanged. The book thus argues that even as minor choices have the ability to shape the direction of one’s life, it’s impossible to predict exactly how or…

Ursula’s life begins prior to the start of World War I and in later chapters, she is in her thirties throughout World War II. War is thus a near-constant presence in Ursula’s life and, despite several attempts to escape its perils, becomes unavoidable. Atkinson never describes a battlefield scene, but she demonstrates how war disrupts the balance of life both in its widespread fatalities and in its disturbance of social norms on an international…

Ursula grows up in the country in early twentieth-century Britain, a time and place that proscribes relatively rigid gender roles to its citizens. Women are associated with domesticity, motherhood, and chastity, while men are associated with work, strength, and violence. Yet because the storylines in which Ursula and other characters strictly adhere to these gender roles lead to far more negative consequences than those in which they do not, the rigidity of these roles is…