"We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load."
Wolgast and Sister Lacey's influence on Amy remains essentially this principle of community. They attempt to communicate to Amy the significance of human connection. When she grows up, Amy adopts this philosophy of resignation to suffering but of a mutual embrace of human relationship. She endures immense hardship for the sake of the people around her because that's where she finds meaning.
“Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.”
In this quotation, Cronin reveals his most profound sense of Amy's character. She's a small-town girl, largely ordinary. From this humble position she is poised to basically save the world, so her origin story is one of hope. Amy is an ordinary person who accepts an inconceivable responsibility and becomes uniquely able to help people.
“It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.”
Wolgast is weathered, damaged hero. Having dedicated his life to violence in service to the government, he willingly steps away from his FBI career in order to protect Amy. He faces a decision which he makes, based upon an internal acceptance of his past in reconciliation with who he wants to become. In other words, Wolgast forgives himself in order to step into the role which he believes will best serve Amy and consequently the human race.
"Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.”
Cronin devotes considerable attention to the environment of the world after the contagion spreads. In the wreckage of civilization, the human survivors watch the artificial environment of their society gradually recede back into the natural environment. The effect of this entropic decay is that people recognize the fragility of civilization itself in contrast to the voracious appetite of the natural world. They feel all the more their evolutionary heritage and consequently look at one another with a renewed sense of astonishment.
