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
This photograph depicts a hypothetical photograph that Geryon never took. Geryon stands beside Ancash’s bed, where Ancash lies, half asleep. Geryon has a tape recorder in his hands and asks Ancash if the battery will last for a few hours. Ancash says it will.
#1748 alludes to the Emily Dickinson poem that serves the novel’s epigraph. The poem uses the image of a “reticent volcano” to explore themes of uncertainty and concealment, both of which Dickinson suggests are inescapable features of the human experience that one must learn to with. In choosing not to photograph himself, Geryon indicates that he is willing to accept uncertainty: to exist organically across distance and time without the compulsion to impose structure and meaning onto it.
Themes
It’s been years since Geryon last flew, but he wants to give Ancash something by which to remember him. Geryon takes flight, soaring through the air toward Icchantikas’s crater. Geryon turns the recorder to capture “a memory of our beauty” for Ancash. As he flies, Geryon gazes down at the earth below. He smiles for his camera, capturing a picture he would title “The Only Secret People Keep.”
The “memory of or beauty” Geryon refers to here is the moment of genuine connection he experiences when Ancash saw and validated his wings. Being seen in the eyes of another enables Geryon to affirm his own identity. “The Only Secret People Keep” are the final words of the Dickinson poem (#1748). In the poem, “the only secret people keep” is immortality.
Themes
