The concept of death has preoccupied people for probably as long as people have existed. Nonetheless, we are are practised at avoiding, forgetting or suppressing the inevitability of our own death. We write about death in philosophy and medicine and sociology, and in fiction too. But typically, these writings locate death “out there”, as an event or a case.
It is rarer for literature to focus on a person who is confronting their own death. George Eliot’s Middlemarch provides one famous example of this approach. Casaubon, on receiving his hopeless prognosis, becomes aware of the heartwrenching difference between “we must all die”, and “I must die – and soon”.
