Death In Faust's This Republic Of Suffering

Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, is a chilling depiction of the American Civil War. Faust’s novel explores her take on the art of death, dividing the equation into nine parts. Beginning with a preface titled The Work of Death, she encourages that death and the significance of it had become a prime idea in the generation. Questions of “who, when, where, and under what circumstances” (xii) should someone die was transposed during this era. All of which Faust explores in depth. She expresses that death is no longer an individual or family experience, but that the mourning of the dead became a widespread phenomenon shared by everyone during the war. Following the preface comes a chapter called Dying. In this chapter she digs into …show more content…
Therefore, habitual niceties took great pain for the deceased’s war partners. Condolence letters were written to reassure families of the dead that their relative’s spirit would live on, and to allow these families to be “virtual witnesses to the dying moments they had been denied.” In other words, death was viewed as a very intimate process, and families took solace in reading about their relative's last moments. Faust then switches the mood to that of a pretty self explanatory mood of a chapter entitled Killing. She asserts that it takes a certain level of intellectual and physiological work to overcome the emotional constraints of killing a person. In this, to a degree, she seeks to legitimize the act of killing as a duty of reflex, such as out of vengeance or self defence. She also brings up the topic of African American soldiers, who were not fighting solely to end a rebellion, but rather for righteousness, equality, and citizenship. Burying addresses the prevalent problem of where to bury the bodies of the deceased. As the casualties rose, the possible places to bury soldiers decreased. Faust goes into detail about the attempts to attain humanity of the dead, and follows the evolution of soldier burials. Starting with makeshift cemeteries …show more content…
Americans were sorted into groups of surviving or dead, and each individual took on a new identity in the country; widows, orphans, murderers. And this, ultimately, transformed the American society. Faust uses statistics and fact as well as graphic description to shock the reader and reveal that the Civil War is not as glorified as it is usually made out to be, and instead, at this time Americans were overwhelmed with their deceased brethren and the fear of the afterlife, or lack thereof; and convince the audience to observe how much the Civil War shaped the American culture and society. Faust puts a fresh take on the Civil War, digging deeper into the more gorey, worrisome themes and putting special point on the residual impact of the war on America as a whole, establishing her argument highly