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 and Herakles graffiti “SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING” on a high school wall. Afterward, Geryon writes some excuse onto a note to explain his whereabouts to his mother and tacks the note on the fridge. Then, he and Herakles set off for Herakles’s hometown of Hades, which is a four-hour drive to the other side of the island. Herakles asks Geryon if he has ever seen a volcano. He tells Geryon about the volcano in Hades that last exploded in 1923. Herakles’s grandmother had seen it. She spoke of the air growing hot and whiskey bottles bursting into flames. The town had one survivor, Lava Man, who had been imprisoned in the local jail.
Geryon and Herakles’s graffiti message is opaque but seems to gesture toward the divide between the inside and outside worlds, which Geryon is fixated on. “The body achieves nothing” places the outside self as less capable than the inside self, or the “spirit.” However, the lack of punctuation in the message leaves it open to interpretation. For example, one might also argue that the message emphasizes the word “alone,” implying that the body can be powerful, but only if it joins forces with others. Regardless of the interpretation one chooses, the message points to the richness of the inner life and a disconnect between inside and outside.
Themes
