One of the central conflicts of Autobiography of Red is Geryon’s quest for individual freedom. He is keenly aware of the fact that “there is no person without a world,” and this statement ultimately becomes his—and the book’s—thesis on how to navigate the larger world as a free individual. As a young child, Geryon fixates on the notion of “inside” versus “outside,” particularly after his older brother sexually assaults him. He learns that while he can’t stop others from assaulting his physical body, his “outside,” he still has control over his sense of self, thoughts, and “inside.” In this way, Geryon learns that true freedom requires individual agency, and he comes to see human connection and intimacy as necessary for achieving that personal freedom. As such, he longs to connect with others and achieve mutual understanding.
The book contrasts Geryon’s view of freedom with Herakles’s view, which holds that freedom simply constitutes not being beholden to others: having only oneself and one’s desires to answer to and not being restrained by anyone else. His reason for breaking up with Geryon, for example, is because he wants both of them to be free, unencumbered by the responsibility of obligations to one another. He further demonstrates this theory of freedom when he decides to have sex with Geryon during their trip to Peru with no regard for how his actions will affect Ancash, his current partner. Geryon, meanwhile, interprets their sexual encounter as “degrading” rather than freeing because he understands that there is no love or mutual understanding underlying the encounter. The novel juxtaposes Herakles’s unexamined existence with Geryon’s “captive” but meaningful interactions with others to suggest that a fulfilled life is derived not from unfettered freedom but from opening oneself to the world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Self and World ThemeTracker
Self and World Quotes in Autobiography of Red
Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.
For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches. Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver.
Once she said the meaning
it would stay.
Inside is mine, he thought.
Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved.
What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said.
Very likely, said Geryon.
All your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.
I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
How do you think it feels
growing up in a house full
of empty fruit bowls? His voice was high.
His eyes met hers and they began
to laugh. They laughed
until tears ran down. Then they sat quiet. Drifted back
to opposite walls.
Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.
Yellow? said Geryon and he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams
he doesn’t know me at all! Yellow!
There is no person without a world.
It was not the fear of ridicule,
to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,
but this blank desertion of his own mind
that threw him into despair.
[…] Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction.
Just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.
It is
because of her I began to notice moments of death. Children make you see distances.
You can’t be alive and think about nothing.
“…I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.”
I’m a master of monsters aren’t I?
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.
A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has effects
no one can calculate in advance.
There is one thing I want from you.
Tell me.
Want to see you use those wings.
This is for Ancash, he calls to the earth diminishing below. This is a memory of our
beauty.
We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.
