Three Fictional Deaths Compared with the Near-Death Experience

ABSTRACT: This study looks at three popular works of short fiction, by Leo Tolstoy, Ambrose Bierce, and Katherine Anne Porter, in which the main character dies at the end. Some similarities between these deaths and recent neardeath experience (NDE) accounts are that the characters experience various kinds of distancing from their bodies, light and darkness play a role, and two of the stories include a final life review. The principal contrast is that dying in these stories is a lonely and mostly grim business, unsupported by a process that transcends the individual or by progress toward an afterlife or otherworld. The comparison helps define the modern sensibility about dying that is part of the cultural context for interest in NDEs. In Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, Carol Zaleski (1987) traced the lineage of the modern near-death experience (NDE) accounts. She cited their recent roots in spiritualist and medical works from the mid-19th century on and described the otherworld narratives of other cultures and of the European Middle Ages in particular. Zaleski viewed these otherworldly and NDE accounts as a wave phenomenon, a mode of narration that resurges periodically "when the way society pictures itself and its surrounding universe is so changed as to threaten to dislocate the human being" (1987, p. 100). Under such conditions, otherworld narratives offer a reassuring vision. The modern era of the late 19th and the 20th centuries seems to have been one of those dislocating periods. This study looks at three well-known works of short fiction from the past century, works that imagine the experiences of dying from illness, from hanging, and from Brock Haussamen, M.A., i