Every Life Has Impact
The overarching theme of the story is that every life has an unknown and consequential impact on countless other lives. The protagonist, George, learns this lesson by having his wish that he’d never been born granted. He is then shown how much different the lives of those he touched would have been having he never been around to influence them. The first difference he sees is that by his not being born, a bank would have gone out of business. This circumstance would obviously have impacted countless people including those he would never even have known. Because he wasn’t around to save him, the man’s brother winds up dying while still just a child. The story accentuates the various ways that other people’s lives were significantly altered simply because he himself had never been born and thus was not around to impact the outcome.
Be Careful What You Say
The story winds up having a happy ending only because the protagonist is able to take back his original wish to have never been born. This very same story could be rewritten as a tragedy if the mysterious figure who grants George his wish to have never been born had not so done it precisely for the purpose of getting George to make a second wish to take it back. It is only because George is allowed to rescind his earlier wish that this becomes a story fueled by optimism and the directive to appreciate the gift of life. Until the very end when George is allowed to rescind his original desire, the story proceeds as a potentially cautionary tale about impulsively expressing desires at the moment without taking the time to fully contemplate the consequences. Within the purview of the story, this applies directly to making wishes, but it can be extrapolated into real-world circumstances as well. One of the thematic lessons it teaches us to think more deeply and reflectively before saying something to somebody that real life does not allow you to simply “take back” as though you never said it.
Suicide is Selfish
What George is actually contemplating rather deeply and seriously when the wish-granting stranger comes upon him is not wishing he’d never been born, but simply bringing an end to the life he has already lived. He is poised high on a bridge overlooking a cold-water death below when he is interrupted. The content of the story is not really a message against wishing you had never been born so much as an urgent appeal to not try suicide as a way of fixing one’s unhappiness with how things turned out. The story exists as one of the most potential anti-suicide stories ever written, thanks in large part to its incredibly popular film adaptation, It’s a Wonderful Life, which has become an annual holiday viewing tradition for millions. The pursuit of this theme is that every life is a wonderful gift at some level—even if one is not aware of it—and suicide is a selfish act that may adversely impact others in the future precisely because the person committing suicide was no longer around when needed.
