Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in They Both Die at the End, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mortality, Life, and Meaning
Human Connection and Social Media
Choices and Consequences
Friendship and Chosen Family
Business, Ethics, and Dehumanization
Summary
Analysis
Under a highway, Rufus and Mateo stumble across abandoned payphones in a ditch. Mateo tries to protest, but he follows Rufus through a chain-link fence. Rufus uploads a photo of some graffiti that he knows Malcolm would like as Mateo picks up a pair of shoes and says that this place is like a graveyard. Mateo says that last year, he bumped into a kid their age with a bloody nose and no sneakers, so he gave the kid his sneakers. Rufus moves among the discarded payphones, finds one that has “CALL ME, LENA” written on it, and he says he feels like Indiana Jones. With a smile, Mateo says he watched those movies obsessively as a kid; Dad would hide “treasure”—laundry money—for Mateo to find.
The graffiti on the payphone makes it clear that everyone, even complete strangers, are out searching for connection and making that search public. Graffiti isn’t social media, but in this instance, it works in a similar way. Discovering that they both love the Indiana Jones movies helps Rufus and Mateo understand that though they may have seemed very different at first, their upbringings share important similarities. As they learn these things, they both become more real and more human to each other.
Themes
Mateo apologizes for “hijacking” Rufus’s moment, but Rufus says it’s fine—he’s not interested in talking about the societal implications of removing payphones; he just thinks this place is cool. The boys admit that they know few, if any, phone numbers of people they know, and they list all the things that are going extinct including film cameras, post offices, DVD players, and landlines. Quietly, Mateo says that libraries will go eventually. Rufus wonders if he’s thinking about the Scorpius Hawthorne books. Rufus says that Mateo is right: people are horrible and everything is dying. Mateo adds that people only react and points to himself as a prime example.
Mateo sees his and Rufus’s deaths as just one event in a long line of deaths—and some of those deaths are of inanimate objects, or of technology. Conceptualizing their own deaths through this mindset allows Mateo to get some distance and understand that everyone and everything dies at some point. Even if he’s dying at a tragically young age, he’s still part of a much larger cycle that will keep going long after he’s gone.
Themes
