The irony of the end
Throughout the novella the protagonist is cautiously looking through the windows upon the decaying world. At the end she is surrounded by windows, but can’t see anything through them. The final image of a fractured train of thought, where she is trying to see something through a certain window, but can’t finish her thought delivers a message of hopelessness and desperation.
An apocalypse of the world or of the mind
The novella is set in an apocalyptic world where people are being swallowed and killed by an unexplained force in the form of light. That is the premise of the plot, but as the novella progresses the line between the deterioration of the world and the deterioration of the protagonist’s mind becomes thinner, with vague language that can be interpreted in several ways.
Rich in becoming
The protagonist cynically reflects upon her mother’s beliefs-while she was alive she believed that all her deeds led to them being safe from the apocalypse, rich in their becoming. The protagonist also implies that her mother’s death was slow and gruesome, with the slow decaying of the body and mind.
The door holds the outside
In the description of the world falling apart, the protagonist says that her door holds the outside, implying that the prison is outside while the confinement of the house is the freedom. This is relevant to the theme of fear of the unknown and fear of leaving the comfort zone.
