Life and death
This novel is about life and death, but more precisely the story traces the final moments of a dying man's life, as he flashes back to "see his life passing before his eyes." In the context of a last-instant vision, he sees the story arc of his whole existence, and he sees the narrative structure of his life. Although the reader experiences these stories as lengthy remembrances full of emotion and consideration, Everyman experiences them as a strong hallucination in the moment of dying. This raises thematic questions about the meaning of life is everyone's life is essentially narrative and emotional.
Existence and meaning
The novel clearly asks existential questions. First, the plot analyzes the meaning of the family dynamic, because the brother experiences a great deal of jealousy about his brothers, knowing that they got more and perhaps better attention from their parents and therefore became more confident and more powerful. This takes a family dynamic and blows it up into an existential question about life itself. When he finally falls in love with the love of his life, Phoebe, he cannot contain the feelings of passion for long, and before long he feels trapped and cheats on her. Again, the question is existential. Why should he be doomed to experience such fleeting feelings of love, and what did he trade by being the kind of person who doesn't follow through on commitments?
Family and intimacy
The end of the novel shows an ironic dynamic. On the one hand, Everyman's life is full of passion and intimacy, but then again, why does it seem that his end-of-life friendship with Millicent is the most intimate of all? That relationship is a friendship rooted in painting, and it is completely platonic, but when she dies, his life is absolutely thrown into chaos. He stops painting altogether, beset by grief. It seems that for Everyman, family is a domain of intimacy, but somehow it is more easy to connect sometimes with complete strangers.
