Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in An Imaginary Life, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Suffering and Personal Growth
Language, Perception, and Nature
Frivolity vs. Practicality
Childhood, Fate, and Identity
Summary
Analysis
Ovid recalls that he first sees the Child when he is three or four years old. They play together by the olive trees on Ovid’s family farm and speak in a language only they can understand. Even as Ovid grows older, the Child remains the same age. Ovid knows the child is a “wild boy” and wonders if he is the same one that the goatherds speak fearfully of, the boy raised by wolves who becomes a wolf himself when the moon is full. The goatherds believe such werewolves live secretly among men.
Ovid’s recollection of a mysterious language between him and the Child, as well as the goatherds’ fear that any “wild boy” would be a werewolf, suggest that the Child is somehow different from ordinary humans, and perhaps that does really does have some kind of “wild” connection with nature.
Themes
When Ovid grows into a man, the Child disappears. Ovid tells no one of his former playmate, not even his brother. However, he feels certain he will see the Child again, but does not know whether he will be a boy or a man. Ovid feels silly for believing in such fancy, since he is otherwise a skeptic.
The fact that the Child does not age implies that he is either imaginary or supernatural in some way. Meanwhile, Ovid’s skepticism and rationalism sets him distinctly apart from the Child as someone firmly grounded in human society rather than in nature.
Themes
