After Many A Summer - Major Themes

Major Themes

These characters expose questions and answers depicting their various life philosophies until the climax in a Socratic method, while explorations of mortality, eroticism, class struggle, mysticism, and greed are all presented dispassionately throughout.

The story works scientific knowledge into a more traditional form of narrative. The evolutionary principle of neoteny (a phenomenon of adult retention of juvenile-like morphology or behaviour) has been invoked to explain the origin of human characteristics from ape ancestors. The storyline suggests that if we lived longer, we would continue to develop along the path of an ape and eventually become ape-like.

Huxley came from a well-known family of biologists, and his grasp of the principle of neoteny seems to reflect this influence. The story has been interpreted as the British Huxley's contemptuous nod to the Hearstian reality of the United States in the early part of the twentieth century: Jo Stoyte is an allegory for William Randolph Hearst by his acquisitions of art, etc., and living in an opulent estate—similar to Hearst Castle—with Virginia, who can be taken as a parody of Marion Davies. Orson Welles may have been inspired by this novel—after RKO Radio Pictures rejected Welles's two earlier ideas for scripts—to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Herman Mankiewicz, although their screenplay is very different from the novel.