The theme of Death in literature (Anna Karenina and One Hundred Years of Solitude) - Essay Example

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Shakespeares famous lines in Macbeth have long summed up the human concept of death. To be sure, the question of the futility of human existence in the face of death has preoccupied writers of each era. In his remarkably complex novel “Anna Karenina”, Tolstoy has interwoven the theme of death in life as it occcurs in our everyday existence, where we meet death at several moments, in our powerlessness against mortality,our fear when faced with it, and the acts of those wilfully inviting death. Similar in some ways and contrary in many is death in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Garcia Marquez, where in a world of magic realism it comes in various fanciful forms, cannot turn silent the ones it has claimed, and even returns one of its own back to the world of living in the form of Melquiades. It is described with the same straight face as the authors grandmother used to sport while telling the most fantastic or gruesome of tales, which was an inspiration for Marquez to write the novel. One of the similarities that we immediately notice in the treatment of death in the two novels is death seen as an end to sin. The story behind the writing of Anna Karenina involved the following incident, described by his biographer Henri Troyat in “Tolstoy”: Suddenly [Tolstoy] had an illumination. He remembered an occurrence that had deeply affected him the previous year. [1872] A neighbor and friend of his, Bibikov, the snipe hunter, lived with a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, a tall, full-blown woman with a broad face and an easy-going nature, who had become his mistress. But he had been neglecting her of late for his childrens German governess. He had even made up his mind to marry the blond Fraulein. Learning of his treachery, Anna Stepanovnas jealousy burst all bounds; she ran away, carrying a bundle of clothes, and wandered about the countryside for three days, crazed with grief. Then she threw herself under a freight train at the Yasenki station. Before she died, she sent a note to Bibikov: "You are my murderer. Be happy, if an assassin can be happy. If you like, you can see my corpse on the rails at Yasenki." That was January 4, 1872. The following day Tolstoy had gone to the station, as a spectator, while the autopsy was being performed in the presence of a police inspector. Standing in a corner of the shed, he had observed every detail of the womans body lying on the table, bloody and mutilated, with its skull crushed. How shameless, he thought, and yet how chaste. A dreadful lesson was brought home to him by that white, naked flesh, those dead breasts, those inert thighs that had felt and given pleasure. He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death. While writing the novel Tolstoy felt a growing sympathy for the heroine evident in her characterisation, Anna still does hurl hurself into the jaws of death in almost a self-inflicted punishment for her socially aberrant behaviour. In Part 4 ,Chapter 3, much before her death in Part 8, Tolstoy establishes the connection between illicit love and death, when Anna has a significant dream, about a peasant predicting her death at childbirth: "He was fumbling and kept talking quickly, quickly in French, you know: Il faut le battre, le fer, le brayer, le petrir.... And in my horror I tried to wake up, and woke up...but woke up in the dream. And I began asking myself what it meant. And Korney said to me: In childbirth youll die, maam, youll die.... And I woke up." At one of the climactic moments of the novel, she determines death to be the final truth, and it becomes the final illumination of all the darkness in her life: "And the candle by which she had been reading the book filled with trouble and deceit, sorrow and evil, flared up with a brighter light, illuminating for her everything that before had been enshrouded in darkness, flickered, grew dim, and went out forever." (Anna karenina, Part 7,Chapter 31) If we see this with the last flood of Marquezs novel, the climactic instance of death in the novel, which is biblical in its washing away the oppressive decadence and decay of the town, washing away of the deeds of massacre of the people following the banana strike and indeed the prophesies incest that happens unaware. In a strong reference to Gen.6.11:"corrupt before God, and the Earth was filled with violence".Mr. Brown mentioned that he would pay for a three-day revelry after the rains stopped, but, "When Mr. Brown announced his decision a torrential downpour spread over the whole banana region" (Márquez, 322). Márquezs flood mirrors the Biblical flood as well because it was one of destruction. Petra Cotes had to clear her courtyard of dead animals (Márquez, 346), which is analogous to the Biblical passage about the flood in which "every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle" (Gen. 7.22). Another parallel to the scriptures is the exactness of dates - Márquezs flood lasted for four years, eleven months, and two days; the Biblical flood lasted for exactly one hundred and fifty days. Moreover, the sun suddenly burst through in Márquezs flood, which was much like the clear sky which appeared when Noah opened the window of the ark to release the ravens. (Davis) Another point of similarity is the acceptance of death as a part of life, which we see in the effect of Nikolais death on Levin in “Anna Karenina”. His doubts about a benevolent God are settled as he begins to see life as a cycle, of which death is a part. His accepting attitude grows through time after the death of his brother and the birth of his son, the germination of which we see immediately after his brothers death: "In spite of death, he felt the need for life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the threat of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, calling to love and to life. The doctor confirmed his suspicion about Kitty. Her indisposition was pregnancy." (Book 5, Chapter 20) Death is so much a part of life in Hundred Years that it is impossible to separate specific instances, every generation in the Buendia family experiences death in some form or the other, and of course in the death-like isolations suffered variously by almost all the significant characters(one of the Buendias withdraws into his own world making golden fish, another draws a circle around himself to keep out people even when in company, and the list goes on), which fit in as a matter of course in the magically real world of Marcondo. The narrator seems to say, “This is a book, not reality” which comforts us somewhat, but death strikes relentlessly and the entire book becomes a metaphor for the nature of existence, where death happens but life goes on: death is as much a part of life as life itself.Jose Arcadios blood after he shoots himself follows a gravity defying path, but the unreality cannot couch the detailed description of the trickle of blood, which is animated with death: A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amarantas chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. "Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted. The effect of knowledge of impending death is another interesting point of comparison between the two novels. Nikolai is terrified of death and wants to cling on to life, as is Levin, and none of them is prepared to handle death: The sight of his brother, and the nearness of death, revived in Levin that sense of horror in face of the insoluble enigma, together with the nearness and inevitability of death, that had come upon him that autumn evening when his brother had come to him. This feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever.(Part5, Chapter 20) As discussed before, Levins acceptance of death goes through a learning process. In stark contrast is the portryal of the death of Amaranta, who had a vision of death several years before and had been instructed to weave a funeral shroud, on the completion of which she would die. She is calm and cheerful on the day her shroud is finished and announces to the town that she will take letters to the dead. A great box of letters is collected in the hall, and true to her word, Amaranta dies that night.Or, for that matter, Arcadios response to death filled with nostalgia, not fear: In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. It is also apparent that Marquez does not make death a very emotionally disarranging experience for those on the brink, and the deaths themselves are announced in an unemotional, matter-of fact manner. The book begins with a look into the future where Colonel Aureliano Buendía is standing in front of a firing squad, and his thoughts are of childhood: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” He does not die by the firing squad however, he survives thirty-two wars, fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad and when he finally dies it is of old age while he is urinating: death here is an indifferent business without much emotion, but not without irony, a violent life meets a tame death. While Anna does not die during her illness either, providing similar anticlimactical irony, her thoughts, and those she inspires in Karenin and Vronsky, makes it a moment charged with feelings. She comes to respect her husband before her imminent death, and expresses her true feelings: This is what I wanted to say. Dont be surprised at me. Im still the same.... But there is another woman in me, Im afraid of her: she loved that man, and I tried to hate you, and could not forget about her that used to be. Im not that woman. Now Im my real self, all myself. Im dying now, I know I shall die, ask him.(Part 4, Chapter 17) Karenin suddenly becomes humane, and faced with a final farewell to Anna he finds it in himself to love her, and forgive Vronsky. Vronsky takes on the role of Karenin, he is unable to deal with Annas crisis and sinks far enough in self-loathing to attempt suicide. We see how death ruptures the fabric of delusion for a while, and Tolstoy gives the three main protagonists a moment of purity and innocence; where all malice, hatred, jealousy, anger and fear are forgotten. A sharp point of departure in the treatment of death by Marquez is the continuity of life after death, so that some of the characters never really die, and Melaquiades even comes back in aid of his prophecies and also "because he could not bear the solitude." (p.50). A lot of the characters have conversations with ghosts, like that of Prudencio Aguilar, and dead people or haunting ghosts become as much a part of the story as the living.Tolstoys novel contains premonitions of death in dreams but the secret of what happens after death remains just that: a secret. Levin actually gets irritated at not being able to penetrate the veil over life after death, as his brother passes into a world where his perceptions cannot follow. We see that there are certain similarities and some differences between the depiction of death in both the novels. To the extent that they are similar, they project the deepest truths of existence: of death as a part of life, of death being the final equalizer. A lot of the differences are also because of the genres of writing, magic realism can afford to portray death with more imagination and fewer words than a novel grounded in everyday life, because it induces a wilful suspension of disbelief, a degree of freedom impossible in the defined plot and structure of Tolstoys novel. Death is too numerous and repititive in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” for the author to talk a lot about it at length every time it happens, especially in a short novel where almost each word is weighed and used for economy, whereas in “Anna Karenina” we see only a few deaths and a wider stretch. Marquez is able to sketch death with a few bold strokes full of poetic significance and move on, whereas Tolstoy captures it by painstakingly drawing in the details. Moroever, the themes in Marquezs novel are more concerned with mortality, like the circular concept of time and the isolation of solitude. In the case of Tolstoy the story moves around love and life, and various issues pertaining to the Russia of his times, whereas in Marquezs work steeped in Columbias violent history the inevitability of death strikes a very strong note in the tenor of solitude and the essentially cyclical nature of existence. But in their different ways, both authors make a significant commentary on the nature of death, which is so seamlessly connected with the human ideas of love and life. Works Cited Davis. J.M. “An American Reflection: The Thematic Similitudein Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath and Márquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Vanderbilt University.23 Nov 2005. Simpson, L. “Death in One Hundred Years of Solitude”. The Modern Word.23 Nov 2005. Troyat,H.The Roots of the Story: Excerpts from Tolstoy.Public Broadcasting Service.23 Nov 2005. Read More