This study examines the role that death itself or some figural form of death plays in the development of the protagonists in Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Book of the Duchess", Thomas More’s "Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation", William Shakespeare’s "Pericles", John Donne’s "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions", and John Bunyan’s "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners". These protagonists meet the following three conditions: (1) they are placed in a position where they must experience a type of death; (2) they eventually move away from this close conjunction with death, returning back into a world where their main business at hand is that of living; and (3) their experience either takes place in a text of high literary quality or is eventually recorded in such a text.
In these texts, the experience of meeting death and then of moving away from it involves an encounter with death that gives rise to a person’s attempts to counter the spectacle. It is these acts of countering that I want to examine. My guiding hypothesis is that the protagonists who successfully counter death do so by assuming a position of authority concerning the ultimate form of the encounter. In essence, they become authors of their own material representation (a book, a poem, etc.) of the event. The framing of this material representation is guided by a certain hermeneutic that not only allows them to read the event profitably but also gives them the means and confidence to interpret and counter death in future possible meetings.
This basic hypothesis is grounded in the assumption that the successful countering activity is in fact an act of primordial creativity, or a matrix of life-giving energy that brings form and order to the unformed and chaotic. By this energy, the persons who ultimately benefit from their experience are able to sustain a balance between encountering death and countering it, and when the ordeal is over, this balanced tension results in the formation or creation of a new life, or at least a new take on life.