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'What Wilt thou do, old man?' - Being Sick unto Death: Scrooge, King Lear, and Kierkegaard

  • Géza Kállay

Date Published:

5 June, 2011

Abstract:

At the end of A Christmas Carol, the Last of the Spirits points its finger towards "One" gravestone, upon which Ebenezer Scrooge can read his own name. His vexing question is whether he has seen "the shadows of things that Will be" or "the shadows of Things that May be, only"; he takes a solemn oath that he will "sponge away the writing" on the stone. At the end of The Tragedy of King Lear, Lear appears howling, with the dead Cordelia in his arms. He puts a looking-glass to her mouth and declares that, if she lives, "[i]t is a chance which does redeem all sorrows" he has ever felt. At the beginning of his Sickness unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard claims that to be "sick unto death is, not to be able to die - yet not as though there were hope of life"; "when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die". This paper examines the question of death via juxtaposing Dickens's and Shakespeare's respective texts in a Kierkegaardian framework. Is it possible to face the death of one's self at all? Or is it only the death of someone whom one loves most which reveals the meaning of death (and life)? Is death a part of life, or does a "living death" permeate our whole life? How can watching people die in a tragedy be elevating? Or is it the muting of death, as in comedy, which liberates us to live?

 

June 2011: Géza Kállay (b. 1959) is university professor at the School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and visiting professor at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna. He has his PhD from the Catholic University of Leuven. With Fulbright grants, he was a visiting researcher at Harvard University, working with Stanley Cavell, and visiting professor of literature and philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He teaches and publishes, in Hungarian and in English, in the areas of Early Modern English Literature (especially Shakespeare), Hungarian Literature, and the philosophy of language (especially Wittgenstein); he has published 7 books with Liget Publishers, Budapest, and several articles, chiefly with the relationship between literature and philosophy in focus.

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 9, Issue 2
Last updated on 04/16/2020