Stories in which Death looms large

A hilarious cover on an old edition.
Winston does not look like that.

The most uncomfortable thing about 1984 is that Winston Smith's death, if indeed he does die in that second to last paragraph, is unnecessary. His life has been rendered so meaningless, his thoughts so controlled and his will so supple, that death would have been a welcome relief. But the catharsis of death is denied us, even if he does die, because the significant part of death, when human energy and will and resistance leaves a body, happened while Winston's body was alive. In fact, his body improves a great deal after he has completely succumbed to the horrifying tactics of O'Brian and the Party.

In the earlier part of the book he is aware that his death will come, but he seems to rather look forward to it, as an honorable end for a rebellious martyr. He'd rather die, it seems, that comply with totalitarianism. He refers to his impending death often, both he and Julia do, so that the idea of dying does not startle the reader at all. Life is so constrained in Oceania - with its mindless jobs, language designed to shrink the human capacity for thought, gin like car petrol, and saccharin tablets instead of sugar - that death doesn't seem much of a sacrifice.

By the end death seems like it would actually be a blessing, if only Winston could achieve it with integrity. But he doesn't, defeated by the torture of fear [of rats], and he is broken rather than dying heroically committed to his ideals. It is a very discomfiting ending. His admittedly tepid fervor simply fizzles into the nothingness of unrecorded history. If man is preoccupied with his legacy, and I think at least every white man is, Winston's is pathetic. Not even pathetic; it doesn't exist.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book to me was the idea that thought is so unreliable a form of record. Our thoughts are variable, unstable, and so easy to contort. How easy it is to convince myself that something went differently than it did (I think I do this all the time with my lessons). And if pressed on something, I would have a hard time saying that it did, absolutely, happen. The first episode of Sarah Koenig's Serial podcast asks the listeners to try to remember what they were doing a week before at a specific hour. Her point is that witness testimony is fallible, because our memories are so imprecise. The records, it turns out, are absolutely essential. I wonder if this is an idea that my students would appreciate if we spoke about it in relation to Animal Farm. The laws of the land (The Seven Commandments) keep changing, and we need literate people to read them and write about the violations of them if the commandments are going to mean anything.

Two other books in which death looms large:

1. John Banville's The Sea. The narrator's wife has died, and his reflections during a visit to the town where his family used to spend summer holidays are overlain with a bitterness and ---- perhaps it's not bitterness. What is it? Sourness. Ha, yes, Sourness is the right word, because it also evokes smell, which Banville talks about on almost every page. The narrator is understandably sour, having lost his wife, and I imagine his face screwed up into squinty contortions as he encounters the smells of his memories. Here is one passage in which he describes the mother of his playmates, Mrs. Grace, with whom he is infatuated.

I would have said then that she was beautiful, had there been anyone to whom I would ahve thought of saying such a thing, but I suppose she was not, really. She was rather stocky, and her hands were fat and reddish, there was a pump at the tip of her nose, and the two lank strands of blonde hair that her fingers kept pushing back behind her ears and that kept falling forward again were darker than the rest of her hair and had the slightly greasy hue of oiled oak. She walked at a languorous slouch, the muscles in her haunches quivering under the light stuff of her summer dresses. She smelled of sweat and cold cream and, faintly, of cooking fat. Just another woman, in other words, and another mother, at that.

Can't you hear the sourness? He (the narrator) seems to paint the world with his descriptions with a brush dipped first in tar, then in the colors he chooses. The tar bleeds through and lends everything a ruined texture. Everything is mildly disgusting in his lens, though he never says he is revolted. Indeed, if everything has this hue, what is there to compare it to? Well, I shall answer my own question: he must compare it to his life before Anna died, when the brush was  pure. Although, come to think of it, there is no indication thus far that his marriage with Anna was a happy one. Perhaps it is just his newly invigorated sense of morality, or his enhanced feeling of loneliness, which prompt him to be so sour.

My favorite moments in the book are the darkly humorous ones, which usually are only funny because of the placement of a period, or the lack of one.

"For my part, although I am ashamed to say it, or at least I should be ashamed, what Myles put me most in mind of was a dog I once had, an irrepressibly enthusiastic terrier of which I was greatly fond but which on occasion, when there was no one about, I would cruelly beat, poor Pongo, for the hot, tumid pleasure i derived from its yelps of pain and its supplicatory squirmings."

The continuation without reverent pause in the form of a period, in "cruelly beat, poor Pongo," renders the line, I think, very funny, even if I find the image disturbing, and I do.

Or, here, the candor and surprising nature of the confession is subtly funny:

"As the years go on I have the illusion that my daughter is catching up on me in age and that by now we are almost contemporaries."

Looking at these excerpts, I don't think I would read the book. The narrator  sounds awful. And perhaps he is, but he is quite real. And the book is not very long.

2. Markus Zusak's The Book Thief

What a difference a good narrator makes. I'm listening to an audio production of this book which I tried and failed to read on my own this summer. I could not get into it, it felt much to cleverly Young Adult, as though the author was trying to make friends with the multitudes of teens by using cloying techniques like saying, in the middle of a chapter: "Some statistical information:" or, "Some facts about Frau Schneider:" I found these to reek of pandering, and I put the book down before I was 40 pages in. But I love the audiobook version, not least because the British narrator does all the German in a convincing accent and uses entertaining voices for the verbally abusive mother and the schoolmate, among others.

The story is narrated by death, who seems an amiable character, who gives what I find reassuring spoilers. He tells us after one episode between the best friends Liesel and Rudy that Rudy won't tell Liesel he loves her for four years. When Liesel is given two books for Christmas, we learn immediately that she will read one of them thirty times, the other nine. Given that the story is set in Germany in 1939, these spoilers are reassurances that life continues for Liesel, which this reader appreciates.

OK, last note on death. The Bach St. Matthew's Passion is of course about the triumph over death. It is marvelous. We have only really gotten to the chorals, the parts of it in which the chorus, representing the masses witnessing Christ's story, reflect on the events and their implications for their own lives. Here is my favorite so far (it's dark!):

Translation: 

When once I must depart, 

Do not depart from me; 

When I must suffer death, 

Then stand thou by me! 

When I most full of fear 

At heart shall be, 

Then snatch me from the terrors 

Of fear and pain by thy strength!