Death Delayed
“Why do I overlive?” Adam cries
out in Paradise Lost. Author Emily Wilson, in
Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving
from Sophocles to Milton, uses Adam’s
dark lament as the basis for a literary
analysis of living too long.Wilson, an
assistant professor of classical studies,
probes the fate of living on when death
seems preferable in works by Milton and four of his literary
predecessors: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca and
Shakespeare. Each writer composed works in which the main
character
undergoes unbearable suffering or loss
and calls out for death but goes on
living. The tragic tradition,she argues,
sometimes finds its energy in a character ’s
living on rather than in dying when
readers would expect. “Why am I
mocked with death,and lengthened
out/To deathless pain?”Milton’s Adam
moaned. Certainly in our time, we
sometimes hear echoes of Adam’s
anguished cry in patients hooked up
to life support or from those enjoying
the mixed blessing of a longer life.“ Tragedies of overliving disturb the …
reader,”Wilson writes, “by reminding us
that life may feel too long and endings may seem to have come too late.”