Life And Death

Graham Swift is one of Britain’s most important contemporary novelists whose two prestigious novels The Last Order and Waterland have brought him worldwide reputation. However, Swift’s fifth novel Ever After has drawn limited attention, especially in China. If we regard Waterland and The Last Order as the summit of his writing career, then Ever After can be perceived as the novelist’s midway in his scaling of the mountain, wherein there is profound deliberations on life, death, faith and so on.Ever After is a typical Swiftian novel characterized by first-person narration. The narrator Bill Unwin, a middle-aged male on the verge of desperation and collapse, has just recovered from an attempted suicide three weeks before. By interconnecting three narrative strands, Bill begins to tell the story of how he has come into the crisis and why he wanted to commit suicide. The death of his close relatives and the recent brush with death himself compel Bill to think deeply about life and death.In articles and monographs on Ever After, several critics have discussed in detail the reason why Bill commits suicide; however, regrettably, very few critics have, up till now, taken note of the change of Bill’s thoughts and emotion after his attempted suicide, and nothing is said about whether he will take the action again.Therefore, in the thesis, I’ll try to do an ethical reading of Bill’s suicide. Starting with the reasons why Bill attempts to commit suicide:the succession of deaths of his close relatives and disillusionment of the meaning of his life push him into that action, the thesis continues to cover a detailed discussion of the process of his suicide. In so doing, I intend to bring out the truth of his suicide. After examining every detail of his suicide, we can infer that Bill is not determined enough to take the action. On the contrary, he means to get a’new birth’ through experiencing death in his sub-consciousness. As a matter of fact, he has virtually made it. Facing death himself makes him understand the truth of life. The attempted suicide, it turns out, helps him to define his new ’self’. After the event, Bill begins to reflect on life and the world in an unbiased way and eventually comes to understand the truth of life. Then, I will deal with Bill’s condition of his ’quasi-life’, and make a comparison of his spirit with the condition before the suicide, and try to make a conclusion that although death has a powerful and rhythmical recurrence in the text, it is not shown as a deadlock or as an end in itself; rather, the act of dying is paradoxically a dynamic process which generates a new world, a new life, a new birth. It is hoped that in this way we can have a better understanding of Swift’s view on life and death.