"He thinks how strange life is with its frayed edges and second changes; and though by morning he will have forgotten that he ever thought it, Gerard feels as though he is being followed, that there are voices he can't hear, that the footsteps of snow on the window are just that, and like Lucy's conception – life is a string of guided and subtle explosions."
This quote is the last paragraph of the short story. Gerard is standing in his study, contemplating the curiosity and brevity of life. Throughout the story, there is a theme of Gerard wondering at the nature of life; he feels like there's more to life than purely the physical world around him. He has the sense that someone else is in the room with him, but there is no one. The philosophy of life that he resonates with, the "string of guided and subtle explosions," fits his psychology well. There are constantly things happening, and there is a vague pattern and structure to them, but its meaning eludes him as he stands behind and objectively watches the events of his life play out.
"Gerard thinks of his own footprints and how soon they will disappear."
The image of the disappearance of footprints evokes a sense of brevity and loss. Gerard, contemplating the snow and the working of the world, thinks often about the transience of life, and wonders if his life will mean anything. His footprints will soon disappear, and the tracks will be blown away by the wind, erasing any trace of his existence. He's afraid that the same thing will happen to him when he dies. Actually, it may be more accurate to his character to say he's contemplating the possibility of that happening when he dies; he is too detached from reality to feel genuinely afraid of anything so abstract and immaterial.
"He thinks of Izzy. He remembers her laugh, then the roar of snapping flames at her cremation."
The stark contrast between Izzy's laugh and her cremation is a dramatic juxtaposition; the fact that Gerard thinks of them in the same moment, relayed in the same sentence of narration, emphasizes both his obsession with the brevity of life and his objective dissociation with reality. He is hyper-attuned to sensory input such as sounds, smells, and sights; the twin sounds that emerge from his memory form a depressing dichotomy between her youthful vigor and the impersonal incineration of her body after death. The message is clear: at some point, regardless of the exuberance of their lives, all people will die and return to the ground from which they came.
