DEATH AS A SUBJECT OF SELECTED AMERICAN

STORIES AND NOVELS

 

 

To understand the American poets and writers and their fascination with the
topic, one has to go back to the Colonial Period, to the Pilgrims and their religious convictions.

The Puritans believed that God had chosen some people for damnation. After death the elects were granted eternal bliss while the sinners encountered punishment and pain. The Puritans stressed the spiritual, religious meaning of death. Since that tome death was a kind of link, a bridge between materialistic world and heaven, a kind of gate to eternity. It gave the
possibility of being together with beloved Lord. The fear disappeared and was replaced with joy. The Puritan admiration for the subject of death has deeply influenced American culture and American way of thinking. The interest of the writers in this problem reflects at the same time the human faith in the eternal life and the age-long desire to reveal the truth of
life after death.

 

DEATH OF A YOUNG WOMAN

Edgar Allan Poe wrote about seventy stories during his lifetime. In his stories Poe was concerned with the nature of art., and especially with the connection between beauty and death. In fact, he was fascinated with the subject of death that, as Lesile A. Fiedler says. "belonged to the private world of his own tortured psyche". The need for love, understanding and forgiveness remained and in a sense isolated him from other people. As an
adult Poe desired an ideal image of womanhood and it was the death of beloved woman, first of his mother, later of his young wife, that made such a deep impression upon his personality and writing. The Raven believed that the most effective subject for the work of art was death of a beautiful woman expressed by the lips of beloved lover. He stressed the importance of
emotional impact on the reader. Not only did he approach a work of art., as sacred mystery, Visionary Poe, but also demonstrated it as a technical problem, Logical Poe. Most of his stories are visionary ones and they make their appeal to primitive feelings rather than to the knowledge of the world, or people. Poe plays with the idea that life might be prolonged by the power of will. The story shows the agonies suffered by the lover whose beloved woman died. Death of the young wife means pain, despair and disappointment. Above all, it means loneliness. The narrator is alienated from the world because of super-sensitivity.

MURDER

William Faulkner's literature brings a new insight into the human psyche. Faulkner touches different problems, especially those connected with dark side of human life. According to him there is no absolute evil or good. Both those categories, mixed together, create human soul. As a result man fights against his nature in defence of justice and dignity. “A rose for Emily” deals with a spinster hoarding the body of her dead lover whom she killed.
The story presents death as a murder caused by possessive love. She not only punished him by taking away his life but mainly by keeping his dead body beside her, in her house. She sentenced him to eternal life with her. Emily was not afraid of death. It offered her companionship and made an agreement with, her based on a rule: life for life. Death gave her Homer while she gave it her own freedom, personality. Death became a priest who
married them; deathbed changed to bridle bed. She had her man, husband for her own. The story shows the face of death that causes both repulsion and compassion. It proves that only death is able to reveal human's mysteries and change indifference into sympathy.
A Rose, mentioned in the tittle symbolises understanding, love and apology offered to Emily by the town.

 

 

SUICIDE

Ernest Hemingway an outstanding American novelist, storywriter and a Noble Prize Winner, 1954, was strongly concerned with the shadows and enigmas of man's life under the conditions of war and peace. According to Maxwell Geismar, it was the war experience that released Hemingway's enigmas:

"we may almost say, to paraphrase Voltaire, that if there had been no war, it would have been necessary for Hemingway to invent one "

Hemingway presented war as a symbolic comment on the tragic fate of the mankind in the indifferent world. His fascination with the subject resulted in the obsession with death; the description of the day of death filled the bulk of his mature work. In fact, he was especially interested not in the physical deaths but spiritual ones: those of frustration, hatred and guilt
that are present in our life. His books, written in a style that resembles that of journalistic "cables", include the sharpest studies of human constitution, and portray degradation
and disillusion of the lost generation to which he himself belonged. The writer perceived life as a struggle, but for him defeat was more interesting than victory.

The American writes, inspired by Puritan religion and the Gothic horror story, approach the subject of death in many different ways. Their visions of dying, both horrific and optimistic ones express the interest in the hidden blackness of human soul society. Death is the protagonist of their novels while other characters, simple people, are just its puppets.
Poe shows the topic from the masculine point of view. He concentrated on the feelings of the man who lost his wife; the feelings of loneliness, despair and helplessness. He describes death as seen through the eyes of bereaved lover. Hemingway sees the subject from the child's point of view whereas Faulkner looks at it in the community's perspective. Both of them stress the loneliness of a dying person, and perceive it as the feeling that drives
people to crime. Hemingway and Faulkner create the vision of death as salvation, the men are
freed from the trammels of cruel reality, while Poe's image resembles a nightmare. Moreover, Poe and Hemingway analyse the influence of wife on her husband's psyche and soul; they find it the reason for man's madness and alienation from the real world. All the writers trace the human fight against death. However, only Hemingway emphasises the inevitability of death, the truth that we are born with the marks of mortality and our fights to preserve life are futile. They seem to imply that:

 

“it is certainly not wise to avoid the thought of death in
our life. Neither is it wise to avoid the thought of living in the midst of death."

And this sensitivity, or even oversensitivity makes Sylvia Plath's poetry and prose so moving. Her poems describe her inner, disquieting world. Everything is there: love and cruelty, joy and pain, her smiling children and clouds of smoke belching from the crematory. The poetry is bitter and difficult. But there is something in Plath's writings that does not anyone
be indifferent to them. I cannot say that everything in Plath's poetry is clear to me. It is not. I believe that, as T.S. Eliot once said, "the genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

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