Top 10 deaths in fiction

From Dickens to Woolf and Updike, novelists have taken on a dark but compelling challenge: to imagine their characters’ final experience

In some ways, our dealings with death have changed beyond recognition since the birth of the novel. Medical advances have transformed the statistics of infant mortality, death in childbirth and infectious disease. But if death seems less present in our lives and easier to ignore – for a while – we know that is a false and fleeting comfort. For die we still must. All our ingenuity cannot prevent it, for ourselves or our loved ones and it is our human capacity to love each other and the world that gives death its distinctive, bitter sting. By examining our looming fate in art and literature we can attempt to soften that sting, though our prospects are doubtful.

I’m not interested here in the most spectacular, moving or memorable literary deaths, but specifically in attempts to shed light on the experience of dying itself. An experienced death in fiction is unique, in that it is a story the living writer is always unqualified to tell. On the other hand, with her readers equally unqualified to judge, she has a kind of free rein. The perennially blank last page of life is a tempting target for the imagination. My own first novel merely sketched death with artistic licence, but in my second, Learning to Die, I stepped much closer to the brink, hoping to peer over, and was surprised by what I saw. It’s comforting to know that only my fellow speculators – the living – will judge the result.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2DbYpmI