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.

The author also employs symbolism to further illustrate the depths of Atlas’s loss. For example, while he is on the mountain, he always wears a treasured scarf that his mother once gave him, and its presence around his neck serves as a reminder that his thoughts of his mother are always with him, hanging around his neck like an albatross. Burdened by his grief, he also carries a flag in the hope of planting it as high up on the mountain as possible in order to honor his mother in a tangible way. In these moments, Atlas is still laboring under the belief that climbing Mount Everest will bring him a form of peace and allow him to move on, but he must first find a healthier way to deal with his grief. When he finally loses the scarf that has meant so much to him, Atlas finally realizes that by clinging to his grief (just as he has clung to his scarf), he has been holding himself back from fully engaging with his life. When he recontextualizes his assumptions, he finally appreciates the wisdom in his grandfather’s advice about moving forward.

Because Atlas’s grief is so deeply tied to his unresolved anger at his father, he thinks about his relationship with his father often, and these thoughts complicate his rescue mission when his father is trapped on the mountain. Atlas knows that the grief he shares with his father often goes unspoken and has kept them both from truly connecting with one another. His regret over this dynamic becomes explicit when he muses, “If there was really a lesson I needed to learn, then I should return to my father’s side and learn from him. He had so much to teach me. […] There were also things we both had to say, mostly about Mum, and that always kept us apart” (214). In this moment of serious reflection, Atlas starts to realize that in order to heal and find peace, he must let go of his anger and forgive his father. Maddie also helps Atlas see that in hiding the reality of his mother’s imminent death, his father was just trying to protect him, not hurt him.

As Atlas faces life-threatening situations, he learns the importance of moving forward, even when the path is uncertain. The mountain’s unforgiving terrain therefore mirrors his internal struggles, and each step forward becomes an act of resilience and healing. Atlas’s journey ultimately demonstrates that peace is not found at the summit of a mountain but in the culmination of inner healing and growth.