Facing the End: Death Themes in Short Stories
Analysis of Short Stories
In all life there is one singular constant and that constant is death. Everyone must suffer it in their time, both the death of others and the death of oneself. Sometimes a person will have a revelation of self in the moments before death. Sometimes there is no great revelation, only dark silence. In the stories "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Grave" and "The End" there is death. In "End" the death is that of the main character while in "Grave" and "Usher" the death occurs to someone not the main character. Each death has some affect on the characters of the story and on the reader. The theme of change through death is present in all three of these tales.
In "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allen Poe the death does not occur to the main character but to one of his close friends from childhood and his friends sister. The first death in "Usher" is the death of Madeline Usher, the sister of Roderick Usher whom the narrator is visiting. Her passing does not have any remarkable impact on the narrator, but it has a strange effect on Roderick. At the beginning of the story Roderick is somewhat haggard in appearance and afflicted with a strange nervous disorder. "A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely molded chin, speaking in its want of prominence, or a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple made up altogether a countenance not easily forgotten." (Poe, 105) Roderick's nervous disorder is comprised of "a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the ordours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror." (Poe, 105) After Madeline dies and is interred he becomes even more corpse-like and his normal nervousness is replaced by a skittish terror or madness. "The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue - but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out." (Poe, 110) Roderick's behavior also changes drastically "His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten." (Poe, 110) Roderick is slowly going mad since his sister was interred; he seems at times to be "listening to some imaginary sound." (Poe, 110) The changes Roderick goes through after Madeline's death affects him physically, emotionally and mentally. The narrator however, is not directly affected by her death, but rather by the changes in Roderick. The death that affects the narrator is the death of the dragon in the story that he reads to Roderick. During the storm the narrator reads Roderick portions of a book to calm Roderick's agitation. His attempt at calming Roderick seems to be succeeding, until the knight is about to face the dragon. He and Roderick both hear noises that seem to mimic the sounds presented in the story. At first the narrator passes the noises off as his imagination combined with the raging storm, but it is as the hero of the story, Ethelred, kills the dragon, that the narrator begins to get more anxious. The change in the narrator is an immediate change of mental state. At the beginning of the storm he is tired and mildly agitated. When the dragon dies his emotions transform into nervous excitement and finally, as Madeline emerges from where she has been interred and she and Roderick do finally die together, the narrator is gripped by a true terror, and he flees the house only to see it sink beneath the waters of the tarn.
The second story, "The Grave" by Katherine Anne Porter, centers around a young girl named Miranda. Though this story begins with a moving of bodily remains and open, empty graves in a family cemetery, these are not the graves that matter the most in this story. Miranda and Paul each find a small treasure at the empty family cemetery where they first stop at the beginning of the story. After the children are through examining their treasures, they return to the woods to continue hunting. Miranda is a much poorer shot than her brother Paul, and though she does not seem to enjoy killing the animals she enjoys using the rifle and being with her older brother. On their way through the woods, Miranda is lost in thoughts of luxury and does not object when a rabbit leaps out and Paul kills it with one shot. As Paul skins the rabbit Miranda thinks of the fur coats her uncle makes for her dolls with rabbit fur. When the children first discover that the rabbit was pregnant they seem amazed. "Very carefully he slit the thin flesh from the center ribs to the flanks, and a scarlet bag appeared. He slit again and pulled the bag open, and there lay a bundle of tiny rabbits, each wrapped in a thin scarlet veil. The brother pulled these off and they were, dark gray, their sleek wet down lying in minute even ripples, like a baby's head just washed, their unbelievably small delicate ears folded close, their little blind faces almost featureless." (Porter, 362-363) Miranda wants to inspect the tiny rabbits, and she delights in the pretty, "wonderful little creatures". (Porter, 363) Yet, the sight of the small, dead baby rabbits has a profound affect on Miranda, something that she realizes though she does not know why the have such an effect on her. She refuses to take the skin, and Paul returns the baby rabbits back into their mother, which he then hides in a clump of bushes nearby. After its first initial profound impact on Miranda she looses the memory of the death of the rabbit to the depths of her mind until approximately twenty years later when she becomes "reasonlessly terrified" and discovers that she is staring at small animal-shaped sugar candies. At the beginning of the story Miranda is very well adjusted to the concept of death, and remains so throughout the story. Though the dead baby rabbits affect her, frighten her, her memories of the event are somewhat tempered because of the treasures that she and Paul had found earlier that day at the sites of the old graves.
The final story, "The End" by Samuel Beckett, is different from both "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Grave" in that it is the main character that dies. "The End" follows a man who is forced to leave the place that has been caring for him. The people who have been providing his care send him out into the world with clothes and a small sum of money to get started. The narrator lingers at his refuge for as long as he possibly can, until he is forced away. Once he leaves his first sanctuary and enters the city he sees how much the world has changed. He visits several places of lodging, finally finding a place to stay in a basement. He and his landlady have an understanding, she will leave him alone except to bring him food, check in on him and clean his apartment once a week. After a time of living in the basement, the land lady runs off with six months of his rent money, and he is thrown out of the basement by the new owner. He flees to the country, where he sees his son, whom he refers to as an "insufferable son of a bitch." (Beckett, 540) He also comes across a man he had previously known, and the narrator moves in with him in a cave by the sea. The narrator reminds the man that he isn't "in the habit of staying more than two or three minutes with anyone" (Beckett, 540) but proceeds to return to the cave with the man. He stays for a short while, before moving on to a small, dilapidated, wooden shed. Again, the narrator moves, this time to a shack at the edges of an estate on the outskirts of the city, where he sleeps in a little boat. It is in this tiny boat that the narrator lies dying at the end of the story. The narrator admits that he had become "unsociable" (Beckett, 545) and that the words "desert" (Beckett, 545) him. As the end comes closer and closer the narrator begins to have visions. The most important of these is that he sees his father and himself standing above the world. In the vision the narrator's father is holding his hand. The revelation that death brings to the narrator and the reader alike comes within this vision. The narrator reveals about his father "I would have liked him to draw me close with a gesture of protective love, but his mind was on other things." (Beckett, 545) The narrator has, throughout the story avoided any kind of relationship with anyone, including his own son, and his dying vision reveals that he would like to form relationships, but he does not seem to know how. The very last sentence also reveals something of his character. "The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on." (Beckett, 546). This final insight shows that the narrator has nothing to live for, but he will not die just because he does not have a reason to live. Rather, he will live until death claims him, without seeking death out but also without working to avoid or prevent his own death.
In "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Grave" and "The End" there is death, but the death that occurs is accompanied by some kind of change or transformation. Death is the great equalizer and as our views of death change so too the way death affects us changes. We cannot control how or when death will occur or how it changes us, but we can strive to understand what those changes mean.