Desire of Death, Suicide, and Salvation: Problems with Eternity in Miguel de Unamuno

Abstract

Death has a permanent presence in the work of Miguel de Unamuno, both novelistic and philosophical. His conception of mortality can only be understood from the hunger of eternity and from a search for salvation, that may be contradictory with a rationality that in no way is the specific human attribute. From these coordinates, I intend to develop not only Unamuno’s conception of death but of self-induced death and the desire to die, as well as its relationship with the Catholic dogma that would prevent the salvation of suicides. To get this task, I will approach the question from a double perspective. On one hand, I will develop the philosophical elements of Unamuno’s thought related to this topic fundamentally in three works: Tragic Sense of Life, The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, and How to Make a Novel. The consumption of human life as an indispensable condition to understand the development of it and its outlet in death and the question of the conservation of the individual (if possible) will vertebrate the first part of this research. I will also consider Unamuno’s conception of the hero as sinner by ambition and by the concept of transcendental egotism. Naturally, the assumptions that Unamuno inherits from authors such as William James will be duly explained here. Secondly, I will address the question of death and, in particular, suicide (consummated or not) in the novels of the Basque author. Thus, Mist, Aunt Tula, and Love and Pedagogy will be especially relevant and, with some emphasis, some passages by San Manuel Bueno, mártir, in which the problem of salvation and suicide is explicitly considered.