Postmortem

Abstract

This brief conclusion remarks that the four fictional works featured in the book all conclude with something like a postmortem, a survival of the narrative after the execution represented. In the case of The Executioner’s Song, it is a postmortem in the clinical sense, which I briefly characterize. This condition of literature’s survival leads me to reflect, finally, on literature’s ambiguous relations to the death penalty; on the one hand, like the witness to an execution, literature can seem to fulfill or enable the executions it represents; on the other hand, these literary survivals are the ashes or remains of a phantasm that would calculate the end and put an end to finitude.