Religion: The short story contains several religious themes. From the start of the story, the narrator refers to Jim as "the messenger" rather than by his first name, which the reader learns later. At first, this title seems to describe his employment. However, the idea of a messenger is well established in Christian mythology as related to being an angel of God, like Gabriel, who relayed God's message to the Virgin Mary that she would bear Jesus Christ. Additionally, the two main characters of the story, Jim and Julia, begin to seem like Adam and Eve figures, as they are seemingly the only people left alive in the world. Julia comes to think of herself as the "mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life" and of Jim as "her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great 'All-Father' [i.e., the founder or progenitor] of the race to be".[8] Julia's comments paint Jim as both an Adam figure ("All-Father of the race to be") and a Jesus figure ("Son of God"). Julia's own status as the figure of Eve, who betrayed Adam and all of humanity, is enhanced by the fact that her father and fiancé show up, destroying her future with Jim and their plans to continue the line of the human race. At the end of the story, she and Jim are stripped of their status as religious figures when they discover that only New York has been destroyed by the comet.
Race: In portraying a Black man as the last and first man of humanity, W. E. B. Du Bois is engaging in Black speculative fiction, and helping to develop a genre that would later be characterized as Afrofuturism.[9] As Womack argues, Du Bois writes as an Afrofuturist to re-imagine the past and future of African Americans in order to revise the historical and diasporic narrative. In the Afrofuturist narrative, blackness is source of pride, establishing a space where Black culture can thrive: "In Du Bois' analogy, race imbalances were so entrenched that only a catastrophe could bring equity".[10]
Du Bois situated Jim as the destiny of humankind, the man onto whom the responsibility to repopulate the earth is bestowed. Considering the story through the lens of Afrofuturism, Du Bois reclaims and rewrites the origin story in order to re-imagine the African American future-past. In revising the origin story, a story traditionally associated with Protestantism and whiteness, Du Bois is able to recover the beginning of a narrative that, from an Afrofuturist perspective will otherwise eventually dismiss and disregard the Black experience. Through the course of this re-imagined origin story, Du Bois moves Jim, who was relegated to the task of going deep underground to retrieve records from the bank vault, to become the vital source of human life. In doing so, Du Bois has, effectively, re-imagined the experience of becoming human and establishing humanity, more specifically, Black humanity. Du Bois reclaims Black humanity through recasting the narrative source of human existence: the origin story and the story of the savior.
