Death as a Symbolic Theme in Modern Literature Essay

demise as a Symbolic Theme in Modern Literature - Essay ExampleIt happens to be the one and only real absolute. Death separates a character from ones life and love ones, both of which tend to be experiences fraught with much anxiety. In a way death tends to be the ultimate separation and end of life. In this brain death is an expansive experience in the sense that it is a literary concept that transcends beyond the scope of a work of literary creativity to permeate the fate of entire graciousity. Death happens to be a potent subject field that is common to half-size Bee, sum of Darkness, The Convergence of the Twain and The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock. Death is pervasive in all these works of literature, though in each specific work death is not merely about the annihilation of human life, but rather carries a much broader symbolical heart. Death as a pervasive theme lurks almost on every page of Little Bee by Chris Cleave. In both the flashbacks and the confessions rendered by the twain central characters Little Bee and Sarah, unraveling their travails and tragedies, death turns out to be a pervasive reality that imbues the varied aspects of their lives. Little Bee comes across scenes of abject bloodshed and carnage when her family and neighbors are annihilated and killed by the treasure hunters of black gold, in her village. She vividly remembers how her sister got raped, murdered and butchered like a wild living creature. Little Bee tends to be a escort when Sarahs married man Andrew commits suicide in their study room. Like Little Bee, the life of Sarah is time and once more punctuated and jolted by episodes of death. The brutal tale that stands to be the life experience of Sarah gets further highlighted when she and her son Charlie strive to come to terms with the shocking and untimely death of Andrew. Though the three characters that are Little Bee, Sarah and Charlie resolve to deal with the reality of death in their own unique ways, death a t a symbolic level carries an almost singular meaning in their lives aptly conveyed in the words of Sarah, That Summer-the summer my husband dies-we all had identities we were loath to let go (Cleave 22). In the novel Little Bee, death in a symbolic context signifies the loss of an identity, an identity that is replete with meaning, acceptance and a sense of belonging. The central characters in the quest for seeking joy and hope irrespective of this loss of identity tend to surpass the constraints impose by death and mortality. There is no denying the fact that in the Heart of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad, death is not only a concept that comes out as being ubiquitous throughout the setting of the novel, but rather it is a work of fiction that extends a whole new meaning to the concept of death. In the Heart of Darkness, death is portrayed by Conrad as a sly, intimidating and lurking animal that not only hides in the nooks and corners of the African landscape on which the stor y floats, but death excessively emerges to be a primordial fear layered in the dark and complex recesses of the human disposition (Bloom 14). In the Heart of Darkness, the plot unfolds in the Belgian Congo, the abjectly notorious African colony, as further as the greed of European colonizers and the brutalization of the Africans is concerned. Death as a symbolic theme operates at two parallels levels in the story. At one level the story deals with the cruelty of the European colonizers towards their African subjects. The African in the story comes out as a black