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.
Here are 10 fictional deaths that attempt to examine the experience or the immediate anticipation of dying, ordered roughly by the age of the character. Most occur near the end of their respective books, and for some merely appearing in the list is an egregious spoiler. You have been warned.
1. Unn in The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas Eleven-year-old Unn sits hunched in a chamber inside a labyrinthine frozen waterfall, listening to a thousand drops of water falling. She does not feel cold. “Everything that should have been upright was upside down,” and yet “it was just as it should be”. Death arrives as a languid sleep.
2. Niels Lyhne in Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen Disillusioned poet and unrequited lover Lyhne lies in a field hospital with a bullet in his lung, the pain “mercilessly stabbing and stabbing”. Confronted by oblivion, and having lived nowhere near enough, his only respite from terror is a descent into raving delirium as the infection spreads. There is no consolation, no epiphany and no hope. Finally, he dies “the difficult death”. To me this seemed an uncomfortably plausible fate for any of us, bullet or not, and reading it was difficult, too.
3. WP Inman in Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier In the abrupt, upsetting finale of this Homeric tale of a US civil war deserter, the reader shares the dying Inman’s bewilderment. There is something he wants to say to his beloved, but just before we hear it the author courteously, cinematically lifts us away. Our last glimpse – of what seems a pair of happy lovers, his head on her lap – is from a distance.
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