Death as imagery
The portrait of death offered by this novel is one of harrowing admission of guilt, a kind of artistic reckoning of truth. Iris is a character defined by her artistic expression of personal meaning and truth. Death is a silent promise of oblivion that holds her in tension with the meaninglessness of reality. Her death is a real reminder that if she wants to say something, she might as well just say it, because shrouding her personal admission in the artistic layers of her novels is indirect. The imagery of death makes her consult her personal beliefs directly, confessing her sins to the reader.
Art as imagery
The other word that must be invoked here is "art." Art is a response to oblivion from the get-go in this novel. In fact, the protagonist seems motivated to her art because of feelings that she desires to express which are not allowed in her daily sphere. That means that her private emotional point of view goes unshared each day, and art allows her an avenue to save those precious feelings which might have been absorbed into oblivion. Death brings that oblivion to a fever pitch, and thus she pens an artistic confession to end her career with a forceful commentary on truth.
Truth and meaning
Instead of a scientific portrait of truth, this book offers a situational experience of emotional truth and expresses it meta-narratively through the writings of a fictitious author. The juxtaposition of the fictional story to the internal arguments of the story for autobiographical authorial intention provides the novel with a feeling of crisis and sincerity. This novel provides the kind of truth which relates to emotional intelligence, not the kind of knowledge which relates to calculations or fact knowledge. Truth is an imagery of felt suffering and the internal crisis of self-expression.
Horror and evil
The pain of betrayal is horrific to the protagonist. Her personal betrayal was just an affair, which can be admittedly destructive and is certainly a kind of disloyalty. However, the evil that she witnesses from her husband is absolutely chaotic. He has been raping her sister for years, under threats of retribution and blackmail. This creates a kind of horrific appreciation for the spectrum of moral goodness and evil. The portrait of horror can be taken as an imagery of the suffering caused by malice and human evil, with the hint of patriarchal criticism.
