years, Hagar is repulsed by her appearance. She views her overweight, unreliable body with disdain, and when she catches a sideways glimpse of herself in a mirror, she sees:

[A] puffed face marked with purple veins as if someone had scribbled over the skin with a permanent marker. The skin itself is a silvery white, reminiscent of creatures believed to dwell under the sea where sunlight never penetrates. Beneath her eyes, the shadows appear as though two soft black petals have been affixed there. The hair, which should rightfully be black, is a yellowed white, like damask left too long in a damp basement.

Hagar's pride has led her to distance herself from the natural ebb and flow of human connections. In her advanced years, she finds herself trapped by negative perceptions and ingrained habits, making it difficult for her to connect with others. She often doubts people's intentions and dismisses their gestures of kindness. Although she sometimes wishes to be more rational, a bitter or sarcastic remark often escapes her lips, going against her intentions.

Her deep-seated alienation, rooted in her closed-off nature, occasionally results in surprising reactions. Her tendency to push others away leads her to expect rejection in return. As a result, a simple act of kindness, such as a young girl offering her seat to Hagar on a bus, can unexpectedly move her to tears.

Hagar's sense of isolation is also reflected in her views on religion and God. While she never explicitly claims to be an atheist, she doesn't believe in a benevolent deity overseeing the universe. She admits to Mr. Troy, the minister, that she has never been able to pray and ridicules the literal Christian portrayal of heaven: "Even if heaven were real, and measured as Revelation says, so many cubits this way and that, how gimcrack a place it would be, crammed with its pavements of gold, its gates of pearl and topaz, like a gigantic chunk of costume jewelry." Furthermore, she rejects the religious idea that everything in life happens for the best: "I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it."

As the novel concludes, Hagar takes two small yet significant steps to lessen her isolation. She tells Marvin that he has always been good to her, acknowledging what he needs to hear; she is no longer solely focused on her own needs. Despite the effort it requires, she retrieves a bedpan to relieve the discomfort of Sandra Wong, her sixteen-year-old fellow patient in the hospital.

Laurence’s own perception of the meaning of her novel evolved over the years. Initially, she thought that she had written about the nature of freedom through Hagar’s struggle for her own independence and coming to terms with her own past.

Later, she noted that the theme was really about survival, the human need to survive until the moment of death with some kind of dignity and sense of personal value.

Much later still, Laurence observed that Hagar at the end learns what constitutes her true significance: the ability to give and receive love.

The Stone Angel is about all of these things. It surely is about the many mental and emotional barriers that can stultify the freedom to be what one deep down wishes and needs to be. Psychic and spiritual survival requires that those barriers be recognized for what they are. Only then can a person be free to relate truly to others. The essence of relationships, Hagar discovers, is the ability to communicate and love. She does just that in her waning hours, though the habit of long neglect makes the efforts both poignant and comical.

Laurence has steeped her story in biblical allusions and imagery. The most obvious is the allusion to Hagar, Abram’s Egyptian maidservant whose pride forced her to flee to the wilderness and whose son Ishmael was destined to be “a wild donkey of a man.” Desert images of drought abound; the dominant color is gray, and the flowers are mostly those associated with death. In this environment, Hagar turns into a “stone angel.” The water imagery at the end of the book signals the turning point of Hagar’s revival, recovery, and redemption. Yet the ending, though redemptive, is hardly triumphant. What prevails in the reader reflects Hagar’s own state of mind: a profound sense of regret that nearly a whole lifetime had been wasted on appearances, victimizing both self and others.

Vivid and intact, Hagar’s memories often fuse with present reality to produce a temporal counterpoint which lends the novel its flashback structure. Indeed, at the novel’s climax, past and present coalesce so completely that Hagar relives the night of John’s death and revises its history. She imagines that John has returned safely from his night out and that she is given the opportunity to apologize which, in reality, she missed. Mr. Lees becomes the tangible medium through which this intersection of past and present, of reality and desire, takes place. Hagar touches him, believing that she is touching her son. Empathetically recognizing her emotional need, Mr. Lees plays along with Hagar’s delusion to its conclusion, allowing her to exorcise her guilt. That night, Hagar is at last able to sleep peacefully.

Hagar’s peaceful sleep on her last night at the cannery foreshadows her death several days later in the hospital, but her conscious approach to death is by no means peaceful. In the hospital, Hagar begins to struggle with the meaning of her life more tenaciously than ever. She emerges from the cocoon of memory in which she has been absorbed and begins to overcome her alienating pride and to experience life with joy.

While listening to Doris’ clergyman sing the verses of a hymn of rejoicing, Hagar has an epiphanic insight into her own willful role in her life’s unhappiness: “Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine or even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some brake of proper appearances....” Hagar’s insight leads to her repentance for her pride (“Pride was my wilderness”) and her regret for the misery she had caused her husband and son (“Oh my two, my dead. Dead by your own hands or by mine? Nothing can take away those years”).

To the end, Hagar defiantly refuses to pray, even in private, for God’s forgiveness, but her internal confession and repentance lend a mood of Christian reconciliation to her final, spiritual journey into herself. Just before she dies, Hagar recognizes two truly free acts she has done in her life, both of them recent. The first, which she calls “a joke,” is her successful struggle to bring a bedpan to the young woman who shares her hospital room; the second, which she calls “a lie,” is her assurance to Marvin that he has been a better son than John. Hagar excuses and even celebrates the lie not merely because “the dead don’t bear a grudge nor seek a blessing” but also because in the lexicon of compassion which she has finally adopted, it is “not a lie, for it was spoken at least and at last with what may perhaps be a kind of love.”