Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Immortalists, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Choice
Family and Shared History
Obsession
Death, Meaning, and Legacy
Surviving vs. Living
Magic, Religion, Dance, and Possibility
Summary
Analysis
Annie finds Varya and Frida the next morning. When Varya goes to the hospital, she fears that she’s going to die, but Frida has neither hepatitis nor tuberculosis. Each day Varya eats the hospital food and grows more alert. She knows that her actions have irreparably ruined the study. Frida is taken to an animal hospital. Her bone is cracked, and so a surgeon amputates her arm. Varya meets Annie at a café two weeks later, where Varya eats a vegetarian wrap. Annie says that the Drake will allow Varya to resign voluntarily. Varya is grateful, but she knows that the story of her breakdown will get out eventually.
The aftermath of Frida biting Varya continues to show the cost of choosing to survive for a long time over building a full life. Frida’s misery led to irreparable damage because her arm has been amputated. Varya, too, compromised the entire experiment because she felt so miserable about what was happening to Frida. At the same time, Varya is starting to rebuild her life in a way that avoids her previous misery—eating more and trying to engage in life more fully.
Themes
That evening, Varya wakes at midnight feeling empty—her work was meant to be her contribution to the world. But even though she has lost so much, she feels like she now has little to lose. She calls Luke. When he picks up, she explains that she’s sorry for what happened to him and Asher. She tells him he can’t go through life convinced it was his fault, because he won’t survive otherwise. He says that he’d be like her.
The novel again raises the issue of legacy for Varya. Since her work was meant to be her contribution to the world, without it she has to find meaning in other ways. Thus, she turns to her relationships. In counseling Luke not to dwell on what happened to his brother, she is also trying to overcome her own sadness over the loss of her siblings. In addition, she is trying to overcome her fear of attachment by re-forging her relationship with her son.
Themes
Three months later, Varya meets a man she has only seen in photos: Robert. She started searching for him that summer and discovered that he runs a dance company in Chicago. She contacted him, and they agreed to meet when he traveled to San Francisco for a dance festival. Varya tells him how happy she is to meet him, that Klara would have been happy to know he’s alive. He says he still has HIV, but that he made it long enough for treatment to become available.
Even though Robert isn’t strictly family, Varya reaches out to him as a surrogate for her family members, since Robert was there for Simon and Klara at a time when she chose to remain distant. It is the shared experience of knowing her siblings that draws Varya to Robert.
Themes
Varya says she’s never forgiven herself for not visiting Simon after he left home—she was too angry with him, and she thought he would grow up. Robert puts his hand on hers, and she lets him. He tells her not to blame herself, that she couldn’t have known what would happen. Varya asks if he was terrified, knowing he could die from sex. Robert explains that it felt like doctors were telling them to choose between life and death, because they had worked so hard to live life authentically and to have sex authentically.
Robert’s story is a counterpoint to Varya’s own life. Robert’s explanation that many people chose to continue having sex despite the risk of getting HIV ties into the argument that a longer life isn’t necessarily a better one. For many gay people, the notion of not having sex after fighting so hard to be authentic about their sexuality would strip meaning from their lives. Because of this, some chose to live a fuller life despite knowing that those choices could come at the cost of a longer life.
Themes
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Robert says that he loved that Simon was fearless—Simon moved to San Francisco and became a dancer just because he wanted to. Varya says that without her job, she feels adrift, and Robert tells her to be fearless like Simon. Varya thinks that she’s begun to do that in small ways, like sitting back in chairs and taking walks in the city.
Varya’s obsessive behaviors were another way of cutting herself off from a meaningful life. As Robert notes, fearful thoughts are paralyzing, and Varya understands that getting rid of these habits will allow her to build stronger relationships and make her feel freer.
Themes
When Varya returns to her condo, she has an email from Mira, asking to meet on December 11th. Mira is getting remarried to a man who had lost his wife to cancer. To Varya, it seems miraculous that Mira is able to move on. Varya wishes that she could tell her younger self not to try to live forever, but instead to stop worrying. She would tell herself to take advantage of the time she had with her siblings. Varya thinks of some of the “miracles” that her colleagues are trying to recreate in their labs, like a jellyfish that ages in reverse, or cicadas, which hibernate for 17 years before emerging from the soil and singing together.
The story continues to track Varya’s acknowledgement that what she wanted was not a long life, but one that was free from her obsessive worrying. The fact that her siblings were all predicted to die before her made her want to distance herself from them. Now she recognizes that loss is inherent in relationships, and that her obsession with avoiding loss only made her feel guilty after the fact and ruined her relationships with her siblings. The final image of the cicadas, however, offers hope that Varya can overcome her years of “hibernation” and cutting herself off from others, implying that she can still reconnect with those around her.
Themes
