Narrative Level, Internal Time Consciousness and Narrative Ethics: Susan Sontag’s Narrative Art as Evinced in &amp;lt;i&amp;gt;Death Kit&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;

Ning Huixia

doi:10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.14

Abstract

Literary critics have swarmed to shower their comments—markedly diverse comments indeed—on Death Kit. Being not intended for propounding some dualistic interpretation of the novel, this essay ventures to expatiate on the novel’s narrative art manifesting itself in a trinity comprising (1) the technique of narrative level, (2) the technique of internal time consciousness, and (3) the ethic for carrying on the narration. By bringing the extradiegetic, the intradiegetic and the metadiegetic to an ultimate silence, Sontag is meant to suggest that the hero Diddy has finished freighting his death kit and is on the way to the terminal demise. It is by describing how his consciousness performs such leaps and bounds in the temporal stream that his past life repeatedly gains access to his present life and that his present life would instantaneously turn into his past life, and that his future is nonexistent at all except for its sporadic emergences as his dreamlike reverie would induce them. Such leaps and bounds of his consciousness which succeed in acquiring their definite shapes by following the temporal random driftiness have been incessantly intensifying the anguish stemming from the reminiscence of his excruciating life in the past and serve to debunk his expectation that he can restore his vitality by committing a murder in the course of his imaginary life. The falsehood inherent in his imaginary life compels him to realistically cast once more about the advisability of actually committing suicide. Moreover, narration goes in the novel in very strict compliance with an explicit ethics she imposes on herself. This serves to throw light upon Sontag’s approach towards the US government’s propaganda aimed at sanctifying the Vietnam War and the catastrophe brought to that country by American troops. In this way the moral caliber of the novel is vindicated.

Highlights

Four years later after the publication of her debut novel The Benefactor, Sontag created her second fictional work Death Kit. It recounts a tale of an ordinary American who cannot endure his middle-age crisis, choosing to commit suicide to end the agony of living
Compared with the stinging criticism, Sohnya Sayre’s commentary is neutralized, who claims DK is the sequel of TB, “though a distance separates the European Hippolyte and his absurdist homilies on self-love from the American Diddy and his unremitting self-disparagement” [2]
As Benjamin Moser wrote in Sontag: Her life and Work, “one of Susan Sontag’s strengths was that anything that could be said about her by others was said, first and best, by Susan Sontag” [7]

Summary

Introduction

Four years later after the publication of her debut novel The Benefactor, Sontag created her second fictional work Death Kit. It recounts a tale of an ordinary American who cannot endure his middle-age crisis, choosing to commit suicide to end the agony of living He dreams living a vigorous and bold life during his coma but it turns out to be a hallucinatory life; he meets with his final death—the death of his consciousness. As Benjamin Moser wrote in Sontag: Her life and Work, “one of Susan Sontag’s strengths was that anything that could be said about her by others was said, first and best, by Susan Sontag” [7] Throughout her whole writing career, she set about to improve herself and was engaged in a project of self-transformation. This essay is not proposed a dualistic interpretation of the text, but serves as expounding the narrative art manifested in the novel from the following three aspects: silence permeating narrative level, the stasis of inner time consciousness and the narrative ethics

Silence Permeating the Narrative Level

Stasis of the Internal Time Consciousness

Narrative Ethics Evinced in DK