They Both Die at the End stages death as a data point, and the novel invites a Marxist reading of how capitalist infrastructures transform mortality into marketable knowledge. The Death-Cast institution and the Last Friend app function like extraction machines, taking intimate human experience and converting it into information flows. The text repeatedly stages phone calls, notifications and location-sharing as central to the characters' last day, which allows us to trace how algorithmic knowledge structures not only social relations but also the very meaning of a finite life. A Marxist approach also foregrounds classed access to technology and leisure on one's End Day. The book shows that the ability to curate a final day, to mobilize social networks and to be visible online is unequally distributed. Read through concepts by Marx and later theorists such as David Harvey or Shoshana Zuboff, the novel can be seen as depicting a new primitive accumulation: death becomes a site where private firms profit from predictive certainty and from the commercialization of grief. That framing raises questions about who benefits when mortality is transformed into a service.

Reading They Both Die at the End through queer theory shifts attention from death as ending to death as a space in which nonnormative intimacies are created and made visible. Mateo and Rufus, both queer-coded in the text, use their End Day to enact forms of relationality that resist heteronormative scripts about family, legacy and mourning. Their openness about desire and vulnerability, shown through candid messages, shared jokes and physical closeness, produces a counterpublic that insists on queer life even as mortality is imminent. The novel thus stages queerness as a technology of survival, emotionally if not physically. Drawing on theorists such as Judith Butler and José Esteban Muñoz, one can argue that this visibility is performative and politically generative. The protagonists' refusal to privatize their feelings challenges cultural assumptions that queer lives are peripheral or ungrievable. In classrooms this lens helps students discuss how representation and intimate practices can be forms of resistance.

A feminist reading examines how gender shapes expectations about emotional labor and bravery on End Day. The novel allocates certain expressive roles to its characters: caretaking gestures, confessions and emotional disclosure often fall along lines that mirror familiar gendered scripts. At the same time, the protagonists subvert some expectations by showing vulnerability and by relying on nonfamilial networks for care. These tensions invite a feminist critique of how social norms police emotional expression, and how systems of care are gendered and precarious. Furthermore, the book prompts questions about who is allowed to be fragile without stigma. Intersectional feminist frameworks highlight how gender intersects with race, class and sexuality in shaping characters' options. The classroom can use these moments to investigate the unequal burden of care and to consider how friendship functions as an alternative care economy when family structures fail or are insufficient.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, They Both Die at the End stages the protagonists' behaviors as responses to impending mortality that reveal unconscious structures. The repeated risk-taking, confessional scenes and quest to fulfill lists can be read through Freud's concept of the death drive, or later Lacanian formulations of desire and lack. Mateo's cautiousness gives way to daring acts, while Rufus's guarded exterior opens up; these shifts can be interpreted as attempts to rework unresolved traumas and to integrate parts of the self before the final moment. The novel also invites analysis of how narrative temporality functions as a therapeutic frame. The “last day” timeline compresses opportunities for repair and meaning-making, which mirrors clinical processes in which patients face limits and reckonings. Teachers can use this lens to ask how literature models coping strategies, and to discuss ethical questions about agency when time is scarce.

A postcolonial approach reads the book's techno-certainty against global patterns of unequal exposure to death. Death-Cast is portrayed as an authoritative force that speaks from a center of power, yet the novel largely follows urban American youth, which elides broader global structures that make some populations more vulnerable to premature death. This selective framing recalls colonial logics that centralize certain lives while rendering others peripheral. The text therefore becomes a useful site to discuss whose deaths are counted, predicted and grieved publicly. Using postcolonial theory, one can critique how narratives of technological mastery over life often obscure histories of extraction, structural violence and resource inequality. The novel’s focus on intimate, individualized endings can be read as a form of depoliticization, where systemic causes of premature death are individualized and privatized. This reading raises difficult but necessary classroom questions about representation, voice and whose mortality gets narrative centrality.

A New Historicist reading situates They Both Die at the End in its cultural moment, treating the novel as an archive of 2010s anxieties about technology, visibility and mortality. The prominence of smartphones, location sharing and real-time notification mirrors contemporary habits and fears. Placing the text alongside contemporary news about predictive analytics, social media mourning and debates over data privacy reveals how fiction both reflects and shapes public discourse about life in the app age. This lens also encourages students to consider how cultural texts participate in moral debates of their era. The End Day ritualities in the novel, for example, can be read as responses to the late-capitalist acceleration of everyday life. New Historicism opens space to compare the novel with nonliterary texts such as op-eds, tech manifestos and news reports, which helps students understand literature as embedded in historical networks rather than isolated art.