Intimations of Mortality: Death's Shadow in Updike's Oeuvre

Overview & Synopsis

Spanning the curve of Updike’s oeuvre, this essay traces the haunting image of death in his work, in an attempt to reveal the pentimento of death that shows through his recurring motifs and patterns. From his earliest short stories to his late stories and deathbed poems, and culminating in the seminal role that death plays in the Rabbit saga, death’s shadow hovers over and runs through Updike’s work, alternately buried and subterranean or surfacing in epiphanies of immortality vying with the pervasive angst of mortality. Diverging from the familiar readings in Updike critical studies that have tended to foreground his celebrated “yea-saying,” the essay proposes to map Updike’s journey into night and to sound the grief that, like a basso continuo, accompanies author and readers alike up to, in Henry James’s phrase, “the point where the death comes in.”