The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Kalachakra are also known as ouroborans, an allusion to the Ouroboros, the ancient image of a snake consuming its own tail that represents the inescapable loop of birth, life, and death. It thus serves as the novel’s central symbol for the kalachakra’s cyclical existence. Each life begins where the last one started, creating a closed, repeating timeline. The novel repeatedly links this image to the kalachakra condition, as when describing a historical Club member who states that “like the snake he would swallow his own tail and be born again” (44).

The symbol is linked to the theme of The Relationship Between Memory and Personal Identity. For a kalachakra, memory is the only element that provides continuity and meaning across lives. Without it, the Ouroboros represents a meaningless cycle of self-destruction and rebirth, where the individual is erased and no progress is made. The symbol thus underscores the novel’s core argument that identity is forged by the conscious recollection of a life lived, making the threat of the Forgetting a form of true death for beings who cannot otherwise die. At the same time, the implicit violence of the snake’s consumption of itself hints at the traumatic weight of memory for a kalachakra, suggesting that each new birth involves pain.