Death
Pondering over death and Heaven is one of the themes revealed in the short stories collection. It appears from the very first story where the narrator finds the dead cockroach in his suitcase. It is the first death which made the narrator think, think over such things as fear - fear of isolation and existential dread. He remembered how he himself was supposed to die when he was a child, and had brain damage. Fear for death becomes his companion. When his father died the narrator felt sorrow, and even more sorrow he felt when looking at the stone over his father’s tomb with his name on it. Death is present everywhere; it is a destination nobody is destined to miss.
Nostalgia
National identity of Indians is opened through the theme of nostalgia, it is a peculiarity way too common among the Natives, especially among the old ones. The man in the hospital who tried to introduce back some Indian tradition into his family suffers from this “nostalgia for old times”. The narrator also remembers a lecture in the university held by an elderly Indian woman, she told on Indian sovereignty and literature, and the hearers were white professors. She was also a representative of this “nostalgia-damaged-people”. The narrator believes his father to be the one of them too.
Longing for the past is not a rare phenomenon, but it is pathetic in some cases and shows that some people are simply unable to adjust oneself to new conditions and requirements of the time. This problem can be traced among the whites as well, but what is different among the Indians is that they longed for times they did not live in, the times of centuries ago.
War
The narrator’s grandfather served during the World War II and was killed in 1945. The theme of war appears in the stories through the references to the grandfather, and some other cousins of the narrator who served in the Gulf War in 1990, and in the Vietnam War. The most attention is given to the grandfather, and the moment of his death. He was killed while carrying two other wounded soldiers, it was a feat. The war appears as the representation of everything vice and cruel that find place in people, but there are people who can sacrifice their own life for the others to live.
