SOURCE: Horvath, Brooke. “Richard Brautigan's Search for Control over Death.” American Literature 57, no. 3 (October 1985): 434-55.

In the following essay, Horvath examines the ways in which Brautigan's fiction deals with the illusion of cheating death.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted that “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”¹ However, as Keirkegaurd and others have forcefully argued, the prospect of death is life's central fact and the repression of this fact life's primary task. For Ernest Becker, moreover, man's heroism lies in his impossible efforts to transcend creatureliness, to deny death by means of “life-enhancing illusion.”² Among such illusions might be placed statements such as Wittgenstein's and the fiction of Richard Brautigan.

As Becker writes early in The Denial of Death, “The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life...