Age
Age is a very important theme in the novel, since everything seems to revolve around it. For one thing, a young historian meets a widow, and things can not happen the same with each other because of their age. He finds out that the widow has an obsession with being young and having a baby herself, but she cannot have a child. Reading the novel, you realize that being young isn't everything, but sometimes people act like it is.
Love
Love is an important theme in many works of literature, including Aura. It is about a man who falls madly in love with a woman and loses his sense of knowing what is right and wrong. Although a lot of the love in the story can be considered imagined, it is still important as a theme because the characters need to realize that they will not always get what they want, including love.
Superimposition
Going along with the theme of age, superimposition is a very important part of the novel. As a reader you see the old and the new happening at the same time as a sort of fantasy, and that reality is even bolder in the way the second-person novel is told. At one point in the story, we see Aura turn into the widow and Montero turn into the widow's husband, almost as if they are actually those people. The novel, by doing this, is trying to communicate how similar generations are, and how things will always end up in the same sort of way.
