In Patrick White’s “Five-Twenty,” death is used as a motif to express the theme of inescapable dissatisfaction. Because death—at least in the story—lacks meaning or sentiment beyond its physical reality, it offers no redemption for the cycles of frustration White depicts. It occurs with some frequency for a nonviolent short story, but it is always gestured to with a sense of apathy, as White reiterates that the event has no special significance.

The first time this ambivalence toward death appears is in the early flashback to the young man who crashed his Chevrolet in front of the Natwicks’ house. Ella rushed to him with blankets, a pillow, and a rug, which she arranged to comfort him. However, the flashback soon discarded the victim himself in favor of a photographer, who insensitively claimed that Ella’s appearance in the photo would add “a touch of human interest” to the story of the young man's death.

The mundane absurdity of this detail is then embellished by the arrival of a priest, who is there to give "Extreme Unkshun." Possessing no special meaning, this death is just part of the dreadful routine of the evening rush hour—and an opportunity for Royal to scold Ella about bloodying the blankets.

Royal’s death is also closely tied to that same rush-hour routine. Toward the end of his life, he cannot participate in the traffic-viewing ritual because he is confined to bed, so Ella comes in to update him on the appearance of the Handel. Royal asks about the man in the Handel every evening, and the man soon becomes Royal's way of staying connected to that rush of life past their house—even as he reminds Ella more and more of Mrs. Natwick in her old age. Their final conversation before he dies is about a rather dull matter: Whether or not Ella has taken out the garbage.

Royal’s frustrations end with his death, but they are neither redeemed nor reflected upon by the man himself or his widowed spouse. Indeed, Ella is too numbed by the pills from her doctor for much in the way of reflection. She has the fleeting thought that: “You would never have thought boys could kick a person to death, seeing their long soft hair floating behind their sports models,” but the thought is offered entirely without context or explanation.

In the final section of the story, as Ella nervously waits for her date to arrive, there are more traffic deaths, this time at the nearby intersection. The accident was a fatal head-on collision, with bodies being carried from their crumpled vehicles, but unlike before, Ella does not stir or extend any emotional response at all. She is saving those emotions, that sense of sentiment, for the man in the Holden.

The unnamed driver was so often a part of her evening routine, and he now holds the promise of revival, a reawakening of feelings and hopes that Ella had long since abandoned and forgotten. When he arrives, she pours those hopes into him with kisses and romantic murmurings—things she has only experienced in movies—but his immediate death from an apparent heart attack puts an end to those hopes and the promise of escape.

His death cuts off that possibility of escape from the tedium of her life on the veranda, just as the other deaths underline the meaninglessness of that life, captured in the symbol of the constant flow of traffic.