SOURCE: “Dying Twice: Allegories of Impossibility,” in Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 121–43, 237–39.

In the following essay, Wolfe examines suicidal narratives, focusing on Dazai's “Metamorphosis” and “Reminiscences.”

Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading. 

—Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading

[W]hen the imagination of death fails you on some primary level, its commonplace or stereotypical representations need to be repeated, worked through, and exhausted by a narrative which, having taken you through death unsuccessfully a first time, can now recuperate this failure by bringing the reading mind up short against the unpremeditated shock of a second dying. 

—Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression

Writers and critics both seem caught in a bind. Their writing calls for control, mastery, concentration of thought, coordination of mind and hand—all aspects of...