2022 Articles

Reading as if for Death

Marcus, Sharon

“Reading as if for Death” asks how people live in the face of imminent death by analyzing Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach. The few critics who have commented on this novel have focused on its message about the dangers of nuclear weapons. But this middlebrow Australian bestseller, which has never gone out of print, is also an important contribution to the literature of death and dying. The novel focuses on characters who may well be dead within a year after the novel begins but who continue to plant gardens and learn shorthand. In doing so, ON THE BEACH departs from common views of everyday life as passive, static, and immanent, instead portraying it as centered around acts of repair and future-oriented planning. In contrast to representations of mortality that emphasize transcendence and enlightenment, ON THE BEACH sympathetically conveys the combination of certainty and uncertainty that most of its characters endure in living their final days. Shute's novel depicts characters for whom denial, refusing to see what is, and delusion, believing in what is not, become forms of palliative care.