What the theme for Heartland?

One major theme in this story is hopelessness. The unnamed narrator has lost everything he used to have, including a happy marriage. He sees the world as a place which is being destroyed—as a thing being killed slowly. The reader observes this extremely negative outlook in the first paragraph of the story when the narrator comments that he does not want to get emotional about Sam’s loss of TV because he does not want to be “one of the usual schmucks on TV crying” (41).