Death as a Central Theme in Literature

In the contract of life, there are numerous requirements. Every living being must be able to reproduce, practice homeostasis, consume energy, and adapt. However, there is one component of life that facilitators don’t include in their lesson plans: death. While all living organisms must have the ability to perform certain tasks in order to be considered living, all life must come to an end. Death is not a matter of if, but when. Many humans share a common fear of losing a loved one, yet authors utilize death to convey a profound meaning within their novel. In the first paragraph Bill Barich’s novel, Laughing in the Hills, he uses the inevitability of death to supply the reader with insight on the theme of his writing. In any long fiction novel,

After hearing of her diagnosis, the narrator travels from his residence in “California to New York” where his mother lives (3). Staring out of his airplane window, he noticed a change in the scenery. The “mountains giving away to flatlands” is used to not only describe the scenery, but how his life is changing (3). He will no longer be living a lavish life in California, but a depressing one that would “bring tears to his eyes” (22-23). He got a “sense of slippage” at the thought of losing his mother (3). When he finally arrived to his parent’s residence, the narrator was greeted with “brittleness and frost” (4). The author uses these two words with a cold denotation to describe more than just the weather on Long Island (4). Brittleness and frost are utilized to display the narrator’s feeling, as well as the theme of the book. The weather wasn’t the only thing the narrator noticed when he entered his parent’s town. His mother's actions caught his attention as well. When she held his hand, he again felt a sense of slippage (9). It mirrored the sensation he experienced on the airplane. His mom is slipping out of his hands, while life

The most prominent conflict in Laughing in the Hills is the narrator’s mother’s battle with “cancer” (2). Due to the cancer, an unbalanced system of power has arose. Cancer has taken over a role of information and coercive power, leaving the narrator, his mother, and his father without power in the situation. As the cancer took over the narrator’s mother’s body, it gained information on how to reproduce in the most effective way and eventually how to end her life. By using its information power, the cancer was able to not only use its coercive power to kill his mother, but to also put the narrator and his father in a state of grief. Cancer is most definitely a character in Laughing in the Hills and it used its powers to make the other character’s lives more difficult. Thus, the imbalance of power sets up the theme of the inevitability of death and the process of coping with it. While the human characters in the novel may not have possessed any power in the storyline, the author still designated certain details to develop them. When Barich first introduces the narrator’s mother, she is described as “an old woman with bright eyes”. This description represents that she is suffering physically, but she is still in good spirits. In fact, the first statement made about the narrator’s mother is symbolism for the entire novel: the inevitability of death and the