The Immortalists follows the four Gold siblings—Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya—who when the novel begins are part of a Jewish family living in Manhattan in the 1960s. In the book’s opening scene, the siblings visit a local fortune teller, who predicts the exact date of each child’s death. Simon’s and Klara’s deaths are predicted to happen when they’re relatively young, so they try to take advantage of the little time they have left and leave home as teenagers. Daniel, who is predicted to die at 48, seeks out the fortune teller in his adulthood to prove her wrong. And Varya, who is prophesied to live to 88, tries to ensure this fate through obsessive behavior, avoiding germs, washing constantly, and so on. Varya’s fate is left ambiguous, but for all of the other siblings, their actions lead them to die exactly on their predicted death date. Through these outcomes, author Chloe Benjamin suggests that while fate and choice may seem like opposite concepts, they often go hand in hand. As the Gold siblings demonstrate, knowing one’s fate causes a person to make certain choices that actually contribute to the fulfillment of their fate.
Simon’s decision to take advantage of his short life leads him to act recklessly and consequently die of AIDS at a young age,. When Simon is 16 years old, he runs away with Klara to San Francisco. Concerned that he may die at a mere 20 years old, he thinks, “What if the [fortune teller] is right? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.” Staying at home would mean that he might squander the rest of his life in school, working toward a future that he would never achieve. Knowing his fate spurs him to want to make the most of what little time he has, which necessarily involves leaving home. In San Francisco, Simon feels liberated living as an openly gay man and a dancer. But when AIDS tears through San Francisco a few years later, Simon soon realizes that he has it, too. As he lies in the hospital, dying, he explains to Klara that if he hadn’t known his fate, he would “probably still be home, waiting for [his] life to begin.” While there is no way of knowing what might have happened if Simon hadn’t left home—if he really would have died at a young age as per the fortune teller’s prediction—Simon’s knowledge of his fate allowed him to live out his life in the way he wanted, even if his actions contributed to that fate.
Klara also ushers in her own fate through her choices: knowing she will die at 31, she actively chooses to commit suicide on that date to prove the fortune teller’s predictions. Like Simon, Klara is also predicted to die fairly young, and so she leaves home with him to make the most of her remaining years. She travels to San Francisco to be a professional magician, enamored of the idea that she can alter people’s perceptions of their reality. But although Klara truly believes in magic, her partner, Raj, is skeptical of it. In order to prove that the fortune teller’s magic is real, Klara decides to hang herself on her exact death date, thus fulfilling the prediction. Benjamin writes, “[Klara’s] been waiting for something to prove that the woman's prophecies were right. But this is the trick: Klara must prove it herself.” In other words, knowing about her fate makes Klara actively choose to bring it about, again highlighting how fate and choice are interconnected.
Though Daniel does not believe in the fortune teller’s predictions, his choice to prove the woman wrong leads to the fulfillment of the prophecy—illustrating that even those who do not believe in fate can still make choices that bring it about. Daniel trusts the power of free will and refuses to believe the fortune teller when she tells him when he’ll die. He holds that Simon and Klara wouldn’t have died if they hadn’t known about their prophecies. To him, it was purely Simon’s and Klara’s actions (their free will) that led to their deaths. Daniel chooses to seek out the fortune teller on his predicted death date to confront her about the detrimental effect that her prophecy has had on his siblings. He holds her at gunpoint in her home, and when an officer arrives on the scene, the officer shoots Daniel as he threatens the fortune teller. Daniel has the opposite impulse from Klara—trying to avoid his fate and prove the fortune teller wrong. Yet he, too, falls victim to his knowledge. Because of his hubris in seeking her out on his death date and his determination to prove her wrong, he inadvertently fulfills her prediction. Daniel’s outcome thus suggests that fate and choice are both at play; even when a person doesn’t believe in fate, they can still make choices that contribute to it.
Although the novel doesn’t confirm if she makes it to age 88, the obsessively healthy lifestyle that Varya adopts nonetheless reinforces the idea that her knowledge and choices contribute to the fulfillment of her prophecy. The novel doesn’t ultimately reveal whether Varya dies on her exact day, but she does live much longer than Daniel, Klara, and Simon, as the fortune teller predicted. Reflecting on the prediction, Varya recognizes that the prophecy of her death “worked inside her like a virus,” and that it did the same thing to her that it did to her siblings. Varya’s recognition points to the novel’s more subtle thematic arguments about the twining of fate and life: it isn’t just that a knowledge of their fates resulted in the Gold children ultimately fulfilling those fates, but, more broadly, that their knowledge of their fate transforms the very way that they live their lives. The fact that fate in the novel finds ways to fulfill itself is a neat kind of trick. But the way that fate fulfills itself, through the characters’ struggles to embrace or escape that fate, offers a kind of portrait of humanity, of the ways that all people make choices about how to live their lives in the light of their own eventual fate of death.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Fate vs. Choice ThemeTracker
Fate vs. Choice Quotes in The Immortalists
“What are you looking for?” Varya asks.
“Your character. Ever heard of Heraclitus?” Varya shakes her head. “Greek philosopher. Character is fate—that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror.”
In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.
It occurs to Simon that he would like to have a life like this: a career, a house, a partner. He’s always assumed that these things are not for him—that he’s designed for something less lucky, less straight. In truth, it is not only Simon’s gayness that makes him feel this way. It’s the prophecy, too, something he would very much like to forget but has instead dragged behind him all these years. He hates the woman for giving it to him, and he hates himself for believing her. If the prophecy is a ball, his belief is its chain; it is the voice in his head that says Hurry, says Faster, says Run.
In the final piece, The Myth of Icarus, Simon will perform his first starring role: he is Icarus, and Robert is the Sun.
On opening night, he soars around Robert. He orbits closer. He wears a pair of large wings, made of wax and feathers, like those Daedalus fashioned for Icarus. The physics of dancing with twenty pounds on his back compounds his dizziness, so he is grateful when Robert removes them, even though this means that they have melted, and that Simon, as Icarus, will die.
Robert paces the apartment. “We need to stay here,” he says. They have enough food for two weeks. Neither of them has slept in days.
But Simon is panicked by the thought of quarantine. He already feels cut off from the world, and he refuses to hide, refuses to believe this is the end. He’s not dead yet. And yet he knows, of course he knows, or at least he fears—the thin line between fear and intuition; how one so easily masquerades as the other—that the woman is right, and that by June 21st, the first day of summer, he’ll be gone, too.
“I wish—I wish…”
“Don’t wish it. Look what she gave me.”
“This!” says Klara, looking at the lesions on his arms, his sharp ribs. Even his blond mane has thinned: after an aide helps him bathe, the drain is matted with curls.
“No,” says Simon, “this,” and he points at the window. “I would never have come to San Francisco if it weren’t for her. I wouldn’t have met Robert. I’d never have learned how to dance. I’d probably still be home, waiting for my life to begin.”
Thirteen years later, the woman was right about Simon, just as Klara had feared. But this is the problem: was the woman as powerful as she seemed, or did Klara take steps that made the prophecy come true? Which would be worse? If Simon’s death was preventable, a fraud, then Klara is at fault—and perhaps she’s a fraud, too. After all, if magic exists alongside reality—two faces gazing in different directions, like the head of Janus—then Klara can’t be the only one able to access it. If she doubts the woman, then she has to doubt herself. And if she doubts herself, she must doubt everything she believes, including Simon’s knocks.
Klara’s arms begin to shake. Sixty more seconds and she’ll give it up. Sixty more seconds and she’ll pack her rope, return to Raj and perform.
And then it comes.
Her breath is uneven, her chest shuddering; she cries thick, sloppy tears. The knocks are insistent now, they’re coming fast as hail. Yes, they tell her. Yes, yes, yes.
“Ma’am?”
Someone is at the door, but Klara doesn’t pause.
In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.
He could not bear to contemplate his return to work on Monday, and what might happen if he holds his ground when it comes to the waivers. Days earlier, he submitted a request to review his case with the Local Area Defense Counsel, a military attorney who provides representation for accused service members. He knows that Mira is right—it’s best to be aware of what options he has to defend himself—but the request alone was humiliating. Without a job, who would he be? Someone who sat on a bath mat with his back against the toilet, reading about his brother-in-law’s solarium, he thought—an image terrible enough to force him to bed, so that he could fall asleep and stop seeing it.
He saw that a thought could move molecules in the body, that the body races to actualize the reality of the brain. By this logic, Eddie’s theory makes perfect sense: Klara and Simon believed they had taken pills with the power to change their lives, not knowing they had taken a placebo—not knowing that the consequences originated in their own minds.
…Bruna is looking at him with a dubiousness that suggests another narrative: one in which he did not come intentionally at all but was compelled by the very same factors as Simon and Klara. One in which his decision was rigged from the start, because the woman has some foresight he can’t understand, or because he is weak enough to believe this.
No. Simon and Klara were pulled magnetically, unconsciously; Daniel is in full possession of his faculties. Still, the two narratives float like an optical illusion—a vase or two faces?—each as convincing as the other, one perspective sliding out of prominence as soon as he relaxes his hold on it.
When did it begin? She had always been anxious, but something changed after her visit to the woman on Hester Street. Sitting in the rishika’s apartment, Varya was sure she was a fraud, but when she went home the prophecy worked inside her like a virus. She saw it do the same thing to her siblings: it was evident in Simon’s sprints, in Daniel’s tendency toward anger, in the way Klara unlatched and drifted away from them.
Perhaps they had always been like this. Or perhaps they would have developed in these ways regardless. But no: Varya would have already seen them, her siblings’ inevitable, future selves. She would have known.
