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 stares at a blank TV screen in his hotel room. It’s been two days since he saw Herakles, and he still hasn’t called him. He isn’t thinking about Herakles and Ancash in their hotel room, or how Herakles used to like to make love in the morning. Geryon gets up and takes a cold shower. He ruminates on an Emily Dickinson poem about a peach. Suddenly, the phone rings. It’s Herakles asking if he’s hungry.
Geryon’s implicitly jealous thoughts about Ancash and Herakles in their hotel room betrays Geryon’s lingering feelings for Herakles. It will be interesting to see how Geryon’s unresolved issues form the past will be reexamined in a new light years later, when he appears to be making a more conscious effort to redirect his attentions away from his inner life and toward the outside world he learned to avoid as a child.
Themes
Not long after, Geryon is eating at Café Mitwelt with Ancash, who is from Peru and “as beautiful as a live feather.” He explains that his name comes from Quechua, an indigenous language spoken in the Andes. He’s from Huaraz, located in the mountains north of Lima. Ancash’s mother moved to Lima after terrorists took over Huaraz. Now, she works as a cook for a wealthy couple who let her live on their roof. Herakles returns to the table and tells Geryon he knows a Quechua song. He proceeds to sing the “cupi checa” song that Ancash taught him. Herakles’s singing makes Geryon and Ancash feel uncomfortable. Herakles finishes and starts translating the words, but Ancash quickly suggests they do Quechua lessons some other time. Besides, he has to find the post office.
Geryon describes Ancash using wing imagery, observing that he is “as beautiful as a live feather.” In employing such imagery, Geryon positions Ancash as his foil: Ancash is a beautiful, winged creature, while Geryon is a monster. Likewise, Herakles loves Ancash but rejects Geryon. However, the awkward moment where Herakles starts to sing the Quechua song aligns Geryon and Ancash as kindred spirits, united in their reserved, introspective demeanors that are so different from Herakles’s brash, extroverted personality. Herakles’s fervent singing and disregard for Ancash’s discomfort could arguably suggest that Ancash is a cultural accessory that Herakles keeps around to be interesting, not someone he is actually interested in getting to know. In this way, the relationship is somewhat similar to his romance with Geryon: he likes pretty, interesting people and things, but on a purely superficial and selfish level.
Themes
Geryon, Herakles, and Ancash walk through the streets. They see women who turn out to be men dressed in fur coats and feel “a hunger.” Geryon mentions the song again and tells Ancash he thought he heard Ancash’s name in the middle of it. He asks him to translate it, but Ancash pauses before explaining that the song is challenging to translate. Before he can say much more, Herakles turns around, exclaiming that they’ve reached their destination: Harrods of London.
Herakles might be bolder and more socially extroverted than Geryon and Ancash, but his homosexuality forces him and his companions to express their desire for the men in fur coats as a muted “hunger” that they are socially prohibited from expressing aloud. Ancash’s reticence to translate the Quechua song is not unlike Geryon’s reticence to be forthcoming emotionally. Both cases involve an inability to meld their inner and outer lives and a fear of speaking only to be wrong or misunderstood.
Themes
There’s a carousel display of wooden animals inside the store. Herakles spots a tiger and decides it must be Tezca, the tiger god, and would make an excellent present for Ancash’s mother’s birthday. He pulls out a knife and starts sawing at the leather strap that binds the tiger to the carousel. When Herakles is preoccupied with the tiger, Geryon asks Ancash if he can photograph him sometime. When Ancash reasons with Herakles that there’s no way they can get the wooden animal on the plane, Geryon realizes they’re going to leave him behind when they travel to Peru. Herakles finishes sawing at the tiger’s reins. He hits the fuse box, immersing the store in darkness, and he runs from the store. Ancash and Geryon trail reluctantly behind him.
Geryon’s desire to photograph Ancash seems possibly erotic, based on the earlier moment of connection they had in Café Mitwelt. It also implies a desire to immortalize Ancash’s youthful beauty, perhaps. This scene with the wooden tiger further creates a distance between Herakles and the other two men, emphasizing their reserved, introspective demeanors by placing Herakles in a scene that exacerbates his carefree attitude and tendency to act impulsively.
Themes
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