Literature: overview and critical analysis

¶ … Nature of Death in Life

In the novels Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, death stands as a continuous presence, serving as a motivator, a metaphor, a threat, and a theme all at the same time. Death enters into each story as it takes one or more characters and so becomes something with which the remaining characters must cope, but even more than this, death stands as a constant presence in life, always threatening to end it, coloring the choices made by the main characters, and giving them reasons for making the choices they make.

In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov explores both a vision of contemporary America and the internal psychology of the characters, looking both outward and inward at the same time. Indeed, the novelist links the two so that the liberal but plastic landscape of American life is both decried and emulated by Humbert. He sees through the plastic phoniness of much of American culture, but at the same time he relishes his ability to do so, his superiority in knowing more than those around him and in having a higher cultural sense, and the liberalism that permits him to behave as he does, indulging in his perversions while taking a high moral stance at the same time.

Part of that culture is a denial of death so strong that in some ways it can be seen as embracing death, as if that would enable one to control and overcome death. For Humbert, the plastic image of modern American culture is only a way to mask the underlying decay, while high culture in the American setting is represented by Edgar Allan Poe, a clear devotee of death, an explorer of its meaning, and a man who in some ways embraced death as something always existing within life. Humbert is a Poe scholar, and this is important because it evokes memories of Poe's marrying his young cousin as well as of the different poems of Poe and the sense of the perverse that goes along with the works of Poe. Many of the women loved by protagonists in Poe are dead, and Humbert refers to his own lost love as Annabel Leigh at the beginning, a reference to Poe's Annabel Lee and another instance of the wordplay by which Humbert allows glimpses into the perversity and complexity of his mind. Humbert's obsession with Lolita can be seen in part as an effort by an aging man to return to youth and so to escape death.

Death is also depicted in the novel in terms of American popular culture as Humbert sees himself as a Western hero, something he envisions himself to be as he kills Quilty. He sees the battle between himself and Quilty at the last as reflecting the obligatory battle scene at the end of the Western as the hero baits the villain and they fight. Yet, he is never really rid of Quilty any more than he can be rid of the American culture he sees as dying around him. He kills Quilty, but as he drives away he notes: "I was all covered with Quilty -- with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding" (Nabokov 308). Quilty has been a mysterious character through most of the novel, becoming an obsession for Humbert both before and after his death. Images of Quilty are hinted at during the course of the novel as Humbert amasses references to him and makes him into a real person. Quilty is a part of that American landscape as well, an ever-present idea of not an image, always following, always nearby. Just as Poe is obsessed by the nearness of death, so is Humbert obsessed by death in the form of lost love and Quilty.

In the novel Catch-22, set in World War II, the characters are surrounded by death and the threat of death at all times. Many characters die in the course of the novel, and at all times the characters are haunted by the image of death, as might be expected in a war zone. The pilots are supposed to be sent home after a certain number of missions, but the number of missions keeps rising so that no one ever reaches it. At the same time, no one can be sent home if they are rational enough to ask to be sent home -- they cannot be crazy if they can think they might be crazy. The entire structure of the army in war becomes a metaphor for life, with death always hanging over everyone, and with no way of escaping it. Numerous characters die in the course of the novel, some in seemingly normal ways during wartime, hit by enemy fire, and others in inexplicable ways, like Clevinger, who just flies into a cloud and disappears. Doc Daneeka becomes a living metaphor for what has happened to everyone -- he is made "dead" by a bureaucracy that can make a man seem to die by writing it in a report. He is truly a dead man among the living, just as they are all living men constantly among the dead.

Author Heller links the living and the dead in several ways, and one of these ways is inherent in the complicated and often unclear chronology. The story is not told in a linear fashion, and events take place in a more free-form manner, without simply following one another in chronological order. This can mean that a character is dead in one scene and alive in a later one, which only tends to reinforce the metaphorical mixture of life and death, death-in-life, that infuses the story and shapes its thematic concerns. Death enters the novel in the first chapter as the Soldier in White dies in the hospital, after which Yossarian and Dunbar claim that the Texan killed him. Heller returns to this scene several times, from different points-of-view, bringing the soldier back to life and then killing him over and over again.