Archetype Of Death Analysis

Sunsets, evenings, a skeleton, sleep, anesthetic, gravestones, an old man or woman, a stopped clock, coffin, the depth of the see - the void, all of these, are symbols of death or the fear of it. What lies after death is an enigma to all of us, expect the cases when we had a near death experience. However, the archetype of death is not entirely in connection with the physical death. The archetype of death is about our observation of death in other beings; our cognition of it based on our culture, and our notion arising from seeing dead animals; the feeling and the thoughts about these experiences; our endeavor to deal with the possibility of death. If possible, to experience death or any image of it without feeling fear or anxious, can transform …show more content…
As Paul Fairfield mentioned in his book Death and Life, “Confronting one’s personal mortality and grieving the loss of another can either be carried out as tasks that engage fully our capacities of introspection, understanding, sympathy, and the choice, or they can be evaded as so much as unpleasantness.”(117)What the author meant by this is that we can either reflect for our lives from such experiences, or we can avoid them. When it comes to death anything is remotely pleasant, however the tendency to look candidly into the dark side of the human existence is not merely a morose, but it is an education to what is the meaning and purpose of our own existence. Death can serve as an educator because it does change our focus. “It extends our range of vision from the self-imposed narrowness of daily life to a broader and deeper perspective of life as a totality.”(118) Fairfield meant to say that as long as our everyday preoccupations distract us from more fundamental tasks, the confrontation with death reminds us that this life is finite. However, death can be an educator, it does not mean that everyone has taught the lesson. In many cases when humans encounter death we tend to distract ourselves and focus on meaningless things, such may happen as a result of immaturity or merely from the indifference to the deceased. . Ivan Ilych witnessed …show more content…
Even when we are not conscious of this, it is a history of choices that we either arrived at autonomously or delivered others to make for us. To live by our own choices means to accept responsibility for our choices’ consequences. Among other choices that we live by, the most abstruse is the choice of life or death in the face of suffering. It is a choice that many times we are not given the rights to choose. It is to be chosen by an unseen power, loved ones, medical professionals, public opinion, anyone else, but not the individual himself. Similar applies to our beliefs and values, to the norms we live by, the social roles and traditions we take up or leave behind. Fairfield states, “… to turn our back on death is nothing else but to turn our back on life, with all the consequences that follow from this. By the same token, to encounter life authentically is to live in the face of death.”(163)The author describes the connection between authenticity life and death; the one who lived an authentic life will continue to live his last days facing death with no fear of it. Being conscious of our limitations and contingency that surround us, and mortality as well is essential to the task of being human. “If we are a species that lives by our consciousness, then we must become conscious of the reality in both its lighter and darker aspects, transforming what we can and accept what cannot.”(164)We reassert death, in the same way we reassert life,