Death In Mark Twain's An Incantation For The Night

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it” (Twain). Death is a natural fear in which all people face at one point in their life. Because people do not know what happens when they pass away, it is natural to either be scared of the unknown or push the thought to the side and accept it blindly. In literature, often times as people get near the end of their life, they accept their inevitable doom. Their death is usually imagined as a happy and romanticized version of death, rather than dark and gloomy. To further accept the cycle of life, Americans have a fascination with death in literature, and put a big emphasis on funerals, burials,

In the story “An Incantation for the Small Hours of the Night”, the character is dying and describing her experience. As death finally enters her, the character exclaims, “Terror is all I am.” The lady was terrified of dying, and never came to terms with the fact that she will no longer be a part of society. F rancis Bacon once said “Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark.” This is relevant because children naturally fear the dark because it is an instinct just like men fear death because it is inevitable. Similar to children, men fear death because they do not know what lies in it, precisely the same reason why children fear the

One person might miss a recently deceased person, while a complete stranger does not even bother to think about the same person. This is because death is a natural thing and if it does not affect a person directly, people tend not to care. This is false, however, when a person comes across a corpse or a horrific death scene has occurred. This is exemplified when a character in “Cape Cod” states that “if I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more.” Finding one body is terrifying but coming across a handful of dead bodies makes someone think of the event rather than the person themselves, thus proving that death itself is subjective