In Retrospect, Immortality: Death, Phenomenology, Ethics, and Henry James

Abstract

Death appears as figure and ground in the work of Henry James. James demonstrates the willingness to both admire and contest death, seeking in thematic choices and narrative strategies ways to face up to the finitude of human life while representing means to live exuberantly within its shadow. The work of phenomenologists helps in interpreting James’s plots, proxy plots, and temporal strategies—including the retrospect and the analeptic prolepsis—that heighten the reader’s awareness of time passing, time doubling or tripling, and eventually time running out. Recent developments in the care of persons at the end of life by physicians and narrative ethicists benefit from what James discovered in his own literary laboratory, not just that time passes but how to live while it does so.