One Wrong Step

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.

Although the novel’s chief focus remains on the arduous climb up Mount Everest, the true conflict of the story lies in Atlas’s struggle to overcome his grief over his mother’s death. In this context, his habit of freezing up in fear during moments of mountaineering crisis become a metaphor for his broader sense of having “a life in which [he] was frozen” in the moment of his loss, unable to move forward (289). By extension, Atlas’s passion for climbing mountains is really an unhealthy attempt to escape his grief without actually dealing with it. To make matters worse, his lingering sorrow is complicated by his anger over his father’s decision to hide the seriousness of his mother’s illness and take him up Kings Peak when his wife was about to die. Believing that his father knew that Atlas’s mother was about to die, Atlas cannot bring himself to forgive his father for robbing him of the opportunity to give his mother a proper goodbye. Even in the midst of the intense adventures that father and son tackle together, the lingering effects of this grievous loss continue to poison their relationship, and Atlas’s unresolved emotions play a major role in influencing his decisions and behavior on the mountain.