In the essay On Being a Self Forever, Updike reflects on the conception of selfhood and discusses his thoughts on subjects of death and religion among others. On writing about this, he devotes some time to the topic of nothingness:
Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern [negligible].” (Self-Consciousness 228)
This idea of the “two kinds of people” seems to be a focal point of his short story, “Pigeon Feathers,” as seen in its main character, David Kern. In this story, the young David faces a great degree of change, from the physical moving into a new house to the questioning of values …show more content…
The relation between these two highlights the ultimate change, one that haunts David for the duration of the story, of absolute death. The earlier instances of nothingness with the moving and the questioning of religion dealt with deaths of identity, both in a spatial sense and an ideological sense, but what David is concerned about here is the ending of life and its relation to the “self” afterwards. David takes a rather hopeless stance as to how the self exists after death; he sees the self as forever sitting “blind and silent.” That functionless conception of the self is a frightening image of passivity; it renders the former vitality of life into a meaningless form that cannot take any action. Simply, it just sits complacently through space and time. He goes on to think that “no one will remember you,” a concern which deals with the nature of legacy; he implicitly makes an assumption that names and achievements can create a sort of immortality following death, but he then subsequently questions the basis behind that. Does a living identity even matter if it not immortalized? Out of these aspects of his overall concern about death, possibly the most interesting is “you will never be called by any angel.” In thinking back to the interpreted …show more content…
A little later, he looks up the word “soul” in his grandfather’s dictionary. He is momentarily calmed by the definition, as “The careful overlapping words shingled a temporary shelter for him. “Usually held to be separable in existence” (PF 270). Similar to his earlier “objections” about the divinity of Christ, he seeks reasoning for his existential concerns; he wants to be able to find a way to disprove his thoughts, even though he internally already has a preconceived notion of his own personal truths, making this definition only a “temporary shelter.”
This inability to reconcile his concerns manifests itself in other occasions as well. At a catechetical class, he begins to question the Reverend Dobson on what happens after death:
“David, you might think of Heaven this way: as the way in which the goodness Abraham Lincoln did lives after
Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern [negligible].” (Self-Consciousness 228)
This idea of the “two kinds of people” seems to be a focal point of his short story, “Pigeon Feathers,” as seen in its main character, David Kern. In this story, the young David faces a great degree of change, from the physical moving into a new house to the questioning of values …show more content…
The relation between these two highlights the ultimate change, one that haunts David for the duration of the story, of absolute death. The earlier instances of nothingness with the moving and the questioning of religion dealt with deaths of identity, both in a spatial sense and an ideological sense, but what David is concerned about here is the ending of life and its relation to the “self” afterwards. David takes a rather hopeless stance as to how the self exists after death; he sees the self as forever sitting “blind and silent.” That functionless conception of the self is a frightening image of passivity; it renders the former vitality of life into a meaningless form that cannot take any action. Simply, it just sits complacently through space and time. He goes on to think that “no one will remember you,” a concern which deals with the nature of legacy; he implicitly makes an assumption that names and achievements can create a sort of immortality following death, but he then subsequently questions the basis behind that. Does a living identity even matter if it not immortalized? Out of these aspects of his overall concern about death, possibly the most interesting is “you will never be called by any angel.” In thinking back to the interpreted …show more content…
A little later, he looks up the word “soul” in his grandfather’s dictionary. He is momentarily calmed by the definition, as “The careful overlapping words shingled a temporary shelter for him. “Usually held to be separable in existence” (PF 270). Similar to his earlier “objections” about the divinity of Christ, he seeks reasoning for his existential concerns; he wants to be able to find a way to disprove his thoughts, even though he internally already has a preconceived notion of his own personal truths, making this definition only a “temporary shelter.”
This inability to reconcile his concerns manifests itself in other occasions as well. At a catechetical class, he begins to question the Reverend Dobson on what happens after death:
“David, you might think of Heaven this way: as the way in which the goodness Abraham Lincoln did lives after