Epilogue: The Bedbound and Dying

Abstract

After frail old age, the logical next step is the bedbound and dying, and in a brief epilogue the book moves from gerontology into thanatology to look at portraits of the bedbound and dying in Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream (1969) and John Banville’s The Infinities (2009), with a prefatory discussion of Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951) for comparison. Reading these novels in the light of Allan Kellehear’s The Inner Life of the Dying Person (2014), which argues that the prospect of imminent death may prompt new insights and experiences, the epilogue argues that, though the world of the bedbound and dying is in many ways the most alien to the busy consumerist world of contemporary Ireland, the three novels discussed here show the ability of even the bedbound to change and develop in rich and complex ways.