“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” traces several significant themes. Friendship figures prominently, especially the tension that arises in a long-term friendship when one friend is terminally ill. This very premise would normally create an expectation of emotional intimacy during the visit, yet from the outset, the narrator is deeply closed off; this at once introduces one of the story’s core ironies and a concomitant sense of emotional disharmony.

It is ultimately the narrator’s profound aversion to death that underpins this disharmony, creating her unease with being in the hospital and seeing her friend’s declining health. Though she doesn’t say it outright (indeed, she states few emotional realities outright), her discomfort expresses itself through several ways. First, she compares her visit to a bank robbery because the hospital room is surveilled by hospital staff through a video monitor (indicating the seriousness of the friend’s condition). Second, both parties must wear masks (indicating the friend’s fragile immune system), and the narrator observes her friend’s skill and comfort at wearing hers, suggesting long-term use; the narrator, in contrast, feels trapped within it (2). Third, when a nurse comments that the friends “could be sisters” (2), the narrator admits (privately, to herself and the reader) that she has waited two months to visit.