Death and the Absence of Others: A Narratological Investigation of Death and Solitude

Abstract

In the paper, I deal with three novels – Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – to explore the issue of facing death while being the last man or woman in existence. The Last Man is a first-person narrative that chronicles the gradual destruction of the human race by a plague. The third person narration in The Year of the Flood portrays the character Toby trying to make sense of her solitary condition on top of a rooftop spa, all while under the impression that she is the only person left alive in the whole world. Finally, in The Road the nameless father struggles to ensure the survival of his son in a world that has given into cannibalism. To explore the effects solitude has concerning the theme of death, I consider Emmanuel Levinas’s God, Death, and Time and Time and the Other. Levinas is essential because of the stress he places on the ethical and meaningful relationships we enter into as being part of society. Furthermore, Levinas argues that death has a societal feature due to the fact that there are traditionally survivors to remember the departed. The notion of solitude, which is a prevalent theme in each of the three novels, removes that societal context, thus resulting in the last man or woman having to face death alone. The paper, therefore, takes a critical examination of what it means to understand one’s own morality in the absence of others through ideas relating to the issue of suicide, the burden of being the final survivor, and finally the question as to who ultimately remembers the last person. Overall, it is the objective of this paper to explore the ways in which the last man or woman, not only makes sense of his or her solitary conditions, but also confronts his or her own mortality in the absence of others.