Central to “At the Bottom of the River” is the theme of life and death, both concretely and in the more abstract idea of how people should live their lives knowing that death is imminent. In both the man and the narrator, Kincaid portrays internal conflicts that play out in their struggles with their deeds in life and death’s inevitability.

At the start of the text, the reader is introduced to a man who seems content with the things around him. He has a wife and child, a home he has built, food he has provided, and books he has read—by all accounts he should feel accomplished and fulfilled in what he has done. However, he also sees the repetition and ultimately the futility in it all. His preoccupation with whether his actions are meaningful traps him in a cycle of contemplation; the narrator notes that “[h]e sits in nothing, this man: not in a full space, not in emptiness, not in darkness, not in light or glimmer of. He sits in nothing, in nothing, in nothing” (64). The repetition of “nothing” parallels his view that his life is simply a series of routines.