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, the “red monster,” sits at a table in Café Mitwelt writing Heidegger onto postcards he has just bought. He writes to Geryon’s brother, who is now a sports broadcaster at a radio station. He wonders if the restaurant workers will throw him out for writing in German rather than Spanish. He thinks they must be able to sense that he is writing in German. Just then, a waiter makes his way toward him. Geryon panics, but the waiter only asks if he would like another espresso. Flustered, Geryon exits the café.
Being in a foreign country exacerbates Geryon’s anxieties about his monstrosity. In Buenos Aires, his nationality and monstrosity work together to alienate him from others. He demonstrates his alienation by his neurotic, paranoid interaction with the waiter. The word “Mitwelt” is a term the philosopher Heidegger developed to refer to the way one exists in a social environment. That Geryon spends his days in a place called Café Mitwelt writing postcards to family members to whom he is not particularly close symbolizes his simultaneous desire and struggle to overcome his alienation.
Themes
Geryon wonders if he’s gone mad. He remembers a science project he worked on as a child, which focused on the sounds of colors. Everyone he interviewed for the project told him they’d never heard the sound of roses crying underneath the burning glare of the afternoon sun. His teacher had told him he should interview roses, not people. The last page of his project had contained a photo of Geryon’s mother’s rosebush, which was on fire. Geryon stops daydreaming and walks off into the crowded streets of Buenos Aires.
Geryon’s monstrosity makes him feel inhuman, and from a young age he has found it easier to relate to nature than to other people.
Themes
