Loss and Mourning: Writings on Death and its Appeal to the Reader

Abstract

How do writers deal with loss and mourning? Which response do they hope to evoke from their readers? In the absence of any mourners, Scott Fitzgerald himself takes up the role of prime mourner in The Great Gatsby. Proust prefers to immerse the reader in countless memories of his grandmother’s death. Thus he and the reader arrive at the idea of his own imminent death. Joyce emphasizes that death really is the appropriate response to life here and now, however happy it might seem. Finally, in my own ‘death novel’ I endeavour to detach the reader from the experience of loss and mourning. Instead, by using the first person singular narrator, the reader is made to see and experience the beauty of death.