Wafaa Ismail FALI

2009300049

English

Human Body in Defiance to Death in

Philip Roth's Everyman, The Dying Animal, and The Humbling

Over the high, proud mountains, down to the large green meadows, up to the immensity

of the blue oceans, each of these scenes manifests a source from which life flows

differently wearing specific colours. Life, this notion providing human beings with the

meaning of existence and the enjoyment of belonging, marks an everlasting struggle.

Therefore, the relation between life and human beings is defined as a struggle to protect

the idea of existence from the threat of death. However, how long does this struggle

last? Can human beings endure being snatched, or rather uprooted from their place of

belonging, the only place they know and with which they are actually acquainted?

Death, life's counterpart, represents the inevitable final meaning of life in which its

colorful image is bound to vanish letting behind just one somber color, black. As long as

death may actually seen as a part of human experience, it is therefore a part of existence

though no one has got a clue or a logical explanation to its nature. When being

confronted with it as a sudden decisive event, one can figure out that it is an absurd joke

life can ever let behind when reaching its end. In fact, the confrontation between life and

death is seen as complementary in which a complete deliberate surrender occurs as

though life lays down its weapons, those which empower human beings, and hands over
the baton of fate to death for the first and the last time. Out of the end of life raises the

emergence of death in which a new era, new world, only God knows when and where

begins. It is an idea broadly acknowledged that man is meant to go on journeys as far as

life permits; on the other hand, death also allows fellow beings to start a journey towards

the unexpected and the unknown in invisibility from our vision. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

said in his Chronicle of Death Foretold:"Give me a prejudice and I will move the

world"(15). This statement holds the truth that lies behind the human limitation since

death, the judging event, comes when one does not expect. In fact, it is the common

atmosphere that embraces all fellow beings regardless of their races, gender, or beliefs

so as to witness the doom of divergence and extravagance life provides leading them

towards the way of justice and equality.

The subject of death occupied and is still occupying a full area of human interest from

the philosophy of Wise Fatalism till Existentialism, a philosophical thought which deals

with the conditions of existence of the individual person and their emotions, actions,

responsibilities and ideas (Earnshow,17). Its importance lies in the fact that it is

inescapable, being quite sure that it will happen sooner or later. However, the process of

shifting towards the other world, which is a private experience, remains something

undisclosed, blurred even hard to describe.

Many scholars point out that human beings can never report the experience of death as

no one returns from it; nevertheless, they can simply give reign to their imagination to

shape its nature. On such a ground, the experience of death gains an ambivalent level of

presentation in human mind: first it is certain and second it is fictive to account for its
occurrence. It is true that having no idea about something leads to a kind of confusion

yet in the meanwhile it seems to become compelling and extremely appealing. Garrett

Stewart suggests in his book Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction that

death is a semantically unoccupied zone of utterance with no vocabulary native to it

(16). Speculating about death is the first step towards disclosing the universe using of

course imagination alongside human intuition. In the process of discovering the universe

Elizabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin explain in Death and Representation

that much of what we call culture comes together around the collective response to

death(3). Speaking about imagination, human intuition may be expressed in a kind of

pieces of writing; therefore, literature comes at the fore in such a context as being the

manifestation of imagination. Accordingly, death has become a fictionalized experience

used in an effort to understand one's universe. In the same way, death and literature

share in common the necessity of imagination and spaces of invention.

Literature is, in such a context, seeking to fill the gap of abstraction which death actually

represents; death can be deciphered in literary works as abstract embodying loss,

disillusionment, and despair. Many works across ages tackle basically this issue bearing

in mind that the relationship applied on literary fiction is taken as an attempt to attain

morality. Literature has got a human dimension since it is a means of self-expression, a

characteristic shared with human being especially when tackling issues of universal

concern like those of death, isolation, and separation. I bet that any reader who happens

to read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables has not ever touched by the death of Fontaine,

Cozette's mother or the scene of death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens' The Old

Curiosity Shop, or even the death of Cordellia in William Shakespeare's King Lear. It

seems that death touches us all and raises our sympathy on the grounds that it is
increasingly associated with a cliché of pain. These scenes that move our emotions

assert literature's principle of experience sharing.

One of the central tasks of literature is to make a certain structure to the nature of life

and death, giving meaning to both in an effort to get in touch with understanding the

world and to interpret man's role as a part of human condition. In this respect, this

meaning should go hand in hand with society's ideas and beliefs. Merely on this account,

the idea of death has witnessed a shift in the way it is conceived through time and

culture. Let us cast a look on how death is interpreted and seen in Western literature by

authors from different ages.

In classical literature, Homer and Virgil wrote epics in which death is the ultimate end,

this end does not mean disaster but the beginning of a new life. Death is generally a

source of honor depicted in the battlefield of wars in which men die for protecting their

moral principle. Death is, in this sense, a consequence of man's heroism especially when

the writers focused on the delight of the afterlife the dead person gains, an idea marking

a kind of eagerness to step death's bridge towards this new life. The sociologist Phillippe

Ariès treats this idea in his Western Attitudes towards Death and states that the dominant

philosophy of the beauty of death in this specific era is called the "Tamed Death" (67).

Besides, the nature of this welcoming death can be understood via an analogy with La

chanson de Roland, the first French epic.

Moving a bit closer to the middle Ages, the age of Romance treated death differently. It

has no longer become a source of recompense since the significance of heroism is based
on survival. Apart from that, death is regarded as a consequence of a long series of

illness and rituals changing its setting from the heroic battlefield to a place where the

character casts his final breath surrounded by his relatives. Accordingly, the literature of

the middle ages reflects and marks a mutation in attitudes and beliefs due to the shift

from the ancient pagan culture to the emergence of Christianity. In some ways

connected with Christianity, death is increasingly tainted with Christian theology and

associated with judgment or rather punishment so it is no more a subject which man

strives to reach but a judge to whom life lets the final say. Furthermore, human deeds

and mistakes are highly reconsidered when confronting the last moments of life.

Being strongly influenced by the leading figure of Christianity, Jesus occupied a crucial

event in human experience whereby death is the result of pain. Writers of the

Renaissance focused on the honor of Jesus Christ's death, an idea strongly portrayed in

Dance Macabre which is apparently associated with the decay and the decomposition of

the human body. That is why; the images of skeleton have been regarded as a logo or a

symbol for death.

Stepping forth towards the eighteenth till early nineteenth century, the representation of

death in literature has changed due to the growth of tension between religion and

science. Each of science and religion has a specific outlook and interpretation of the

process of dying, an idea that makes works of that time tackle such a problem such as

that of Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (2005). The

conflict between religion and science is crystallized on the account of the restricted role

of God in the universe, an idea stemmed from Lamarck's revolution of natural laws. He
introduced the idea of Le Pouvoir de la Vie (Power of Life) elaborated in A.B. Adams'

Eternal Quest: The Story of Great Naturalists in which he suggested that life is

structured in an orderly manner so that the care of body can avoid its decay (meaning its

death) a thing that created a clash with religion that believes that life is something

ephemeral and can be exposed to death no matter how hard an individual makes to

preserve or restore it.

Another phenomenon emerged in the Victorian literature whereby the vision of death

was looked upon differently as phillippe Ariès asserts that the late eighteenth century

offered more vision of both beautiful and eroticized death (56). This idea is deciphered

in Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) in which she depicted the heroine's death as a

punishment of giving birth to an illegal child in order to convey a didactic message that

carries out the massive outcomes of illegal, unwed relations. Death in literature of such

a century is really involved in erotic of dying illustrated in Eva's death scene in Uncle

Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (185). Ariès notes that such scenes are used to

represent a sense of comfort or literally eternal rest. The late nineteenth century then

developed the Victorian cult of death, a term used to show the extent to which this

period's obsession and fascination with death actually reaches its climax. In fact, this

fascination has been developed to an almost erotic level using bed as a motif signifying

one's beginning and end; it is the cradle and the hearth, one's final place of rest.

The depiction or rather the conception of death seems to differ across cultures and time.

The break of the twentieth century brings along a new interpretation to death as it has

been looked upon as an enemy; subsequently, this era is fundamentally characterized by

emergence of nuclear weapon threat urged modern literature to show concerns and a

deep attention to death as a result of terror, torture, and nuclear weapon. It is really

apparent that the angle from which one sees the death has completely changed in the

sense that it has been examined as far as its causes are concerned; now death is seen as

an effect on the grounds that it has become the product of man himself. In the

meanwhile, modern literature shows a considerable rejection of religion and science

altogether as a strong reaction tainted win the sense of disillusionment they pass

through.

Another reason why Science and religion are also rejected is because of being the

ultimate source from which one can understand, interpret, and accept death. On the

other hand, there were other writers of the same era who believed that death might lead

human beings to create art and understand the value of life as Wallace Stevens suggested

that death is the mother of beauty in his poem Sunday Morning (1915). Death is

examined from a spiritual perspective of the existentialist vision of afterlife in works

like Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (1944).

Lawrence Langer sheds light on the crisis of death and religion in modern age in his The

Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (1978) and characterizes death as

inappropriate, absurd, and unnecessary yet very much at door (62). This idea comes in

relation to the art ability to deny death as it is absurd, an idea reinforced mainly by T. S.

Eliot and William Butler Yeats who confronted a world of death on a global scale during

the World War I and looked to the imagination and literary art as the ultimate refuge to
burst out the beauty of words and the strength of meaning in spite of the pessimistic

sense of impending apocalypse shown in their works The Waste Land (1922) and On

Being Asked of a War (1915) respectively. Eventually, the writers of this era questioned

to which extent art can continue to stand as an antidote to death and whether beauty of

art can be assumed sufficient to deny death.

Moving to twentieth century American literature, one can find writers like Thomas

Pynchon who sees death in his Gravity's Rainbow (1973) as a cultural process which

determines the entropic ending of the American society and is the result of chaotic

culture. Culture preservation means an entire life as Robert Lowell suggests in his "For

the Union Death" (1959), yet death stems from culture abandoning. Death in American

literature is interpreted on the basis of society and as an idea that is worth to be

negotiated by individuals and social groups. However, it remains a kind of puzzle and a

source of curiosity as American literary works put the spotlight on the human's struggle

to understand death and eagerness to explore its implications vis-à-vis life. In this

respect, death is taken as a tool that facilitates the questioning of the value of life.

The ghost of death is still spotted in literature through time. It wears different guises

going hand in hand with a given age's culture and ideas. In the twenty first century

American literature, death is generally associated with terror especially after the events

of September, 11th. It seems that the nearer times comes forth, the somber the idea of

death is portrayed and interpreted in post-modern American literature. The American

writer, after living and witnessing the terror and considerable disasters this event left

behind comes out with a new tradition and new way of treating and examining things
shifting towards more plurality in dealing with issues of common concern, an idea that

comes at the core of the Post-modern period. The mutation in American literature from

modernism to post-modernism marks necessarily a variation in the portrayal of the idea

of death. It is significantly deciphered from modern denial of death to the stage of

defiance. Death, therefore, has become a teasing, absurd idea that threatens the human

beings' peace of mind and contentment of life and should be challenged. It sounds

somehow illogical yet many writers associate the final stage of life or rather old age with

the last moments before being buried in a tomb. Maybe due to the fact that death has not

anymore become a natural process but an effect of a certain cause such as health

deterioration and precisely old age problems and frailty.

Many contemporary American writers tackle the issue of death differently. Philip Roth

is one of those writers who give this idea a special importance. He has actually turned

his gaze from topics of national issues to man's lifelong denial of the confrontation with

mortality. He actually deals with this idea by not using it as a keystone to symbolize a

virtual process of burial and disappearance from the world but as an idea that provokes

human melancholy even in life. This paper is an attempt to get in touch with the

divergent ways death is expressed in Philip Roth's fiction and how he suggests the

human body to stand in opposition to the haunting, threatening assail of death. I will rely

on Michel Foucault's theory of the body in The Care of the Self along with Mark

Johnson's The Body in the Mind to examine and reinforce this argument in The Dying

Animal, Everyman, and The Humbling to illustrate the above suggestions. This paper is

also a psychological speculation to scrutinize how Roth's characters face obstacles to

come in term and to accept death and malaise of old age.

expresses his deep concern and a denial since he sees death as merely a process of decay

in which one's identity vested in his body ceases to represent him. In the same context,

he puts the emphasis on death as an idea coming in connection with the end of hope and

unaccomplished dreams. Therefore, he not merely takes the process of dying as an

unexpected sudden, inevitable process but as a manifestation of man's failure and

alienation in the actual life. This divergent view of death is subsequently manifested in

the novels proposed since each of them bears a certain connotation, face, and

explanation of death; however, the persisting and common idea Roth actually uses to

defy death is the care of the body.

It is apparent and obvious that the issue of body and its importance as a representative of

man's existence in culture and society has been brought to light for the reason that the

issue of the body has occupied a central position in post-modern studies. Similarly, it

remains a mysterious, unexplored area due to its inconstant meaning across time. The

body is used as a complex system in which nature and culture actually meet. Johnson

argues that the natural body, in so far as there is one, is continually augmented by the

products of history and culture which is readily incorporating into its own intimate space

(38). Many writers take the body to explain some post-modern issues among whom

Roth who makes of it a weapon in front of the threat of death, as an overshadowing end

and disaster in opposition to the body which is regarded as a source of reproduction,

regeneration, life, and precisely continuity. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's definition of

man's body as a controller of everything whereby man may become a kind of prosthetic

god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent (qtd in Johnson,

38-39).
Philip Roth's Everyman (2006) revolves around a semi-biographical theme pervaded by

a strong fear of isolation especially of that eternal isolation of grave. It is candidly

ultimate yet universal novel of loss, regret, and stoicism. Everyman is about a man who

witnesses his health deterioration overwhelmed by an obsessive sense of death.

Therefore, the novel is fundamentally concerned with tracing the protagonist's feelings

as he goes more and more old and sick, he starts seriously reconsidering his deeds to

show a sense of loss and regret in preparation for the decisive moment of facing truth

providing a bleak, pessimistic view of life.

"Leaving-the very word that had conveyed him into breathless,

He considers this formula: old age, sickness, death as three elements going hand in hand

with each other. That is why; he concentrates on the care of his body as the one

determining the time of death. Everyman is more about a man's medical chronicle in a

tentative, escapable confrontation with death in each of his surgeries.

In some way connected with this idea, Michel Foucault introduced the care of the self

through sexuality as a primordial way to make the human body remain longer in life.
This process marks the promotion of the sense of youth, as Foucault points out, and

serves to avoid the malaise of the old age (94).

However, one may ask to which extent or rather how long can this process or tentative

solution last? Roth relies on Foucault's idea to calm down the psychological fear and

obsession so that death ceases to be conceived as a monster or an ominous ghost. In

addition, he associates this solution with the protagonist's erotic nostalgia for the

previous joys of life in Everyman. He also links human drives with dependence on the

care of the body and keep it safe from illness and deterioration. This premise is seen as a

possibility of body's ability to dictate the path of one's life.

"There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided
by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said
to have located a philosophical niche for himself […] Should he
ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a
Male Body" (Roth, Everyman 52).

The continuity of one's life, for Roth, goes in accordance with the presence of a woman.

As readers can decipher, Everyman's protagonist witnessed the worst moments of his life

when being deserted by his wife, or rather, wives, and finally his daughter. The

unbearable sense of alienation and loneliness reflects his frailty and incapability of

facing death alone. Every woman who happens to emerge in his life underlines a certain

episode or phase in his life. Whenever he is abandoned by a woman, he finds himself

embraced by death. The importance of partnership is what may create a strong shield

against death. Within the confines of corporal psyche that Johnson suggested one can
imagine experiences of his own body in which there is a highly particular intersection of

desire and fear.

Moving to Roth's second novel, The Dying Animal (2001), one can pay attention to the

epigraphs Roth chooses from poets like John Keats' Odd to Nightingale and W.B.Yeats'

Sailing to Byzantium as it is the case in Everyman and The Dying Animal respectively.

The poems chosen can be viewed from the perspective of paving the path towards

reaching a direct access to the darker sides of human nature, reflecting the stark hideous

darkness of it where desire, morality, and rationality collapse. His novels, especially the

ones chosen for the subject of this paper, suggest how Roth speculates about man's

position and the possibility that facilitates the way to make him acquire something to

which he holds on, something real and significant that keeps him safe from decay and

loss. In Roth's world there is no room for redemption as everything perishes letting the

way to desire and death, the two extremes that reshape the pattern of human existence. A

world where spirituality disappears and feelings stand in the face of cruelty and disaster

of life.

Philip Roth brings to issue the idea of death as related to separation from a beloved

woman. In this respect, death is not examined technically as a natural process but as, if I

may say it, an image that can best describe one's melancholy and loss. Roth most often

than not sees woman from the physical side giving way to the animal instinct to be

dominant, maybe for this reason he entitles his novel The Dying Animal. It has a

connection with Darwinian Man- unaccomodated man, who is no more than a poor,

bare, frail animal. On the other hand, Roth offers the presence of woman physically a
deeper philosophical significance as regarded a thread binding him with life. In other

words, a woman's presence entails life affirming, a tool to live longer temporarily.

The Dying Animal joins two opposing powers whereby Eros stands in the face of death.

In fact, this novel draws on its events from the character of David Kepesh who describes

well Roth's intention of highlighting the significance of woman presence in one's life.

The writer usually tends to give his characters an age that approximates seventy years

old to reflect that there is no way out to step back to youth but being with a woman. The

Dying Animal is based on David Kepesh's recollections of an affair with a young,

beautiful woman that makes his life dwell in an erotic disorder. He is actually a brilliant

TV culture critic and successful lecturer at a New York college. Consuela, Kepesh's

student, is much younger than him yet she gets involved in an affair with him, a thing

that makes Kepesh be brought to youth again giving him a kind of self-confidence and a

more reason to hold on to life.

"Can you imagine old age? Of course you can't. I didn't. I have no idea what
it was like not even a false image—no image. And nobody wants anything
else. Nobody wants to face any of this before he has to. How is it all going to
turn out? Obtuseness is de rigueur". (Roth, The Dying Animal 106)

Here again the idea of body standing in defiance to death appears when body desires

transcend morality or human mind and boundaries of the old age. Johnson sees that the

tension between body and mind grows when reaching an old age as Samuel Beckett

points out to this idea in his plays when representing the image of old age through the
obvious separation between body and mind and dramatized the inevitable physical decay

of the body as an actual manifestation of this tension (42).

The tension between mind and body is also seen in another light as Mark Johnson

proffers a claim that all thinking is originated in bodily experience as it is a form of

schemata which manipulates a physical world concerned with laying foundation to more

abstract modes of thought (48). In fact, it is clear that Johnson puts the stress on the

importance of the role that the body plays to help mind conceive experiences. In such a

context, the body, the physical side, has become the one which dictates the mind, the

moral side. Indeed, it is the case of Kepesh and Consuela's relation in which the body

gains significance more even that moral. However, Kepesh witnesses his decay when

being apart from Consuela due to the gap of old age; it is simply death in which the body

cannot express itself. He sees his affair as revenge to death manifesting this idea in his

dichotomy: desire versus morality as an ultimate connection with life.

"The comedy of creating a connection that is not the connection-that

It is the case also that overlaps with Foucault's The Care of the Self in which no one can

express his integrity in isolation from the other. The consciousness of the body comes

from illness (53). The ghost of death is apparently hovering around Consuela whose
illness urges her to be aware of the significance of her body, the source of her pride and

attractiveness, as it undergoes a kind of metamorphosis or rather loss one of its organs.

"in every calm and reasonable person, Kepesh mourns," there is a

hidden second person scared witless about death" (Roth, The

Dying Animal 98)

Consuela ends up with being diagnosed with a breast cancer that leads her to undergo

chemotherapy and mastectomy. Death can also wear this situation of the unbearable

sense of loss.

Philip Roth usually uses the same ingredients to produce a world of art. As it has been

mentioned previously, he focuses on the issue of death in his trilogy Everyman (2006),

The Dying Animal (2001), and The Humbling (2009). All of them encompass and

somehow share the same idea of death manifested in malaise of old age in addition to

being apart from a given woman. These ideas are also well crystallized in the last novel

suggested for this paper.

Many scholars agree upon the idea that Roth is one of the premier contemporary writers

who make of the cartography of human consciousness their starting point. Death, in turn,

is a part of human consciousness which kills and consumes human desires and liberty.

Roth's last novel The Humbling is as much centered on death as on the portrayal of

body, being a source of defiance and liberty. In this novel, like the previous ones, Roth
highlights the premise of physical presence of a woman and its role in alleviating the

pressure of death and makes it somehow bearable. A ritual question may pass through

readers' minds: what for are these sex obsessed figures depicted in his latest works,

then? A tentative answer is that those figures can be used as a counterpart to death. Yet,

a reader can bear in the back of his mind that no matter how hard the body strives to

provide human beings with a way to escape, its effectiveness is meant not to last for the

long run but for a stint period of time.

This situation does apply on The Humbling's main character, Simon Axler who

witnesses his death vested in his inability to act as well on the stage as he has usually

performed before. The sense of losing artistic creation, talent, or rather magic means the

end of the artist and initiates a new era seen as a dead life. Here, one can see that Roth

does not really mean death as a process of burial but as a bitter, unbearable sense of

frustration and despair stemming from the loss of something dear and needed.

"Everything is over for Simon Axler, all his great roles are melted

into air, into the air, his confidence in his power has dawned away,

he imagines people laughing at him: he can no longer pretend to

be someone else". (Roth, The Humbling 17)

Old age as related to loss and despair and therefore death has no longer become a new

theme in Roth's fiction. Simon Axler is in his seventies when he realizes that he has

become a body without a moving force, meaning artistic gift which something that leads
his artistic career to an inevitable collapse. Again despair and isolation are available to

be the effects of the old age. In fact, the protagonist passes through a series of problems

after being deserted by his wife; he loses the hope to life seen through his attempt to

commit suicide. He is apparently filled with a feeling of emptiness which has been

altered and filled by an erotic relation with a young woman.

Pegeen, who emerges as a healer or a savior and gets involved in a secret affair with

him, is a forty years old woman and a daughter of his two colleagues. Axler stepped to a

new phase in his journey as though he has been brought to life again when being joined

with Pegeen.

"His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can't persuade

him to make a comeback…. Into this shattering account bursts a

counterplot of unusual erotic desire. In this long day's journey into night,

all our life's performances, talent, love, sex, hope, energy, and reputation

are stripped off" (Roth, The Humbling 18 ).

The idea of the body as a defiant to death is still persisting though seen in a different

light in The Humbling. Assuming that Roth usually bases his works on self

consciousness as a part of human psyche, the tension between the body and the soul is

also found here yet here it is viewed from a platonic perspective. It is an idea broadly

admitted that the Western philosophy lays foundation on the Platonic dichotomy of body

and soul in which the body is regarded as a prison, a tomb for the soul or psyche. This
idea treats the soul positively whereas the body is damned as being a source of

temptation and therefore, corruption.

Both of those two entities, the body and the soul, are subject to change. However, the

older a human being is, the wiser he will likely be. For Roth, however, the Platonic view

is actually examined in another way in the sense that the body is the one dictating mind

even though it undergoes old age; it can keep and convince the mind that it is still

capable of pursuing its way in life reckless about death. In other words, death may

become a hollow idea when the body is well cared of; this idea does prove Plato's

premise of the soul being prisoner of the body. Roth wants to show through his novel the

eternal tension between Eros and Thanos.

Returning to the novel, woman's presence is again a main pattern appearing as a refuge

which provides a kind of temporary distraction and escape from ordeals. It is apparent

through reading the three novels that the aging heroes of Roth's late fiction succumb to

despair, they strive to find relief and renewal not through work, therapy, or redemption

but through an affair with a younger woman.

Woman is still regarded as the thread binding desperate old man with life a solid ground

that one can step on and savior from the threat of death. However, her disappearance

spells the cut of this thread and makes man move closer to death in Roth's fiction. The

Humbling's protagonist meets his end just after his lover's separates herself from him.

This separation is nothing but a bitter death. In fact, man's struggle with depression and
loneliness as he ages is the death the author means. Despair is simply the inventory of

the character's sense of loss and old age's deficiency.

"His voice was trembling and his heartbeat had quickened… It was the

way he had felt at the Kennedy center. If he were given this role to act in a

play, how would he do it? He could no more figure out how to play the

abandoned elderly lover. Shouldn't he just have blown his brains out while

Pegeen's mother was the other listening? Wouldn't that have been the best

way to play it?" (Roth, The Humbling 151).

Suicide is the appropriate solution to suppress the teasing feeling of depression as

nothing left to live for. Death in this case has already covered the character, the virtual

death resulted from the suicide is something complementary. It is really a dreadful

ending as he makes, out of his choice, his path towards death.

Our environment decides and dictates how human beings live and how they handle

situations such as the malaise of old age. Philip Roth treats this specific issue, and to

react upon it he produces literary works to bring readers about the process of getting old.

In Everyman, The Dying Animal, and The Humbling old age does not bring wisdom to

characters: on the contrary, the foresighted feature they are supposed to acquire through

their long experience in life is transformed into a long series of childish attitudes. Death

is also portrayed as a social convention yet an enemy one should stand against it using

the power of the body. As one can notice in this paper, I find out that death Philip Roth

is constantly afraid of is not the process of dying and being buried somewhere, but the
sense of loss, despair, and deterioration one might feel during his lifetime. Death is

mainly seen from a psychological, figurative perspective. Being apart from family and

friends is essentially a death. However, at the core of any hard moment, one may find a

moving power that makes him step forth. No matter how bitter and unbearable death

may be, it provides human beings with wisdom as much as life may give.
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Putnam's Sons, 1969.

Ariès, Phillippe. Western Attitudes towards Death from the Middle Ages to the Present.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1972.

Bronfen, Elizabeth and Sarah Webster Goodwin. Death and Representation. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Draper, John William. History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. New York:
Cosimo. Inc. 2005.

Ernshow, Steven. Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplex. London: Cromwell Press Ltd,
2006.

Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: the History of Sexuality. London: Vintage
Books, 1988.

Garrett, Stewart. Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction. U.S: Harvard
College Press, 1984.

Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Langer, Lawrence. The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1978.

Primary Source Philip Roth's Works:

Roth, Philip. The Dying Animal. New York; Vintage International Books, 2001.

-----,------. Everyman. New York: Vintage Books, 2006

----,-----. The Humbling. New York; Johnathan Cape, 2009.