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Chapter 6
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Last Cuentista, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Story and Memory
Assimilation vs. Diversity
Family
Resistance, Courage, and Kindness
Summary
Analysis
Still awake and immobilized, Petra listens to Ben move around the youth stasis room. Talking to himself, Ben picks out a digital book—The Epic of Gilgamesh—and starts to read it aloud. He reads until midnight, when he stops and notes that it’s Petra’s birthday. He mentions that he couldn’t get her mythology elective approved, but that he has his own collection of stories that he can secretly upload into her Cog. Ben picks out an array of famous authors and installs their works into Petra’s consciousness. Petra is overjoyed, and as she listens to the stories playing in her mind, she finally feels herself starting to fall asleep.
Ben’s choice of The Epic of Gilgamesh, generally thought to be the oldest known written story, indicates his own reverence for history and storytelling as a practice. This, combined with his kindness and empathy, results in an act of resistance against the Lead Monitor and the rising Collective. It’s unlikely that Ben yet suspects the full obliteration of stories that the Collective will later try to enact, but his kindness organically leads him to an action that will destabilize that regime.
Active
Themes
