Summary

Part Five of the novel is divided up into four small sections.

THE LITERATURE OF DEATH -

Broyard writes that whereas in the 1960s books told people how to rescue oneself from an identity crisis, in the seventies and eighties there has been a wave of books telling you how to die. Death has been so suppressed throughout the twentieth century that in these late decades it has become fetishsized or in Geoffrey Gorer’s words, “Pornography” (70). Up until the seventeenth century, dying was part of “the flow of life,” but after that people began protesting it as though it were unnatural (71). Phillippe Ariés argues in The Hour of Death that when people started turning away from communal dying, the drama of dying in isolation led to its romanticization in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century...