Popular narratology as the swivel of death’s door: rhetoric as transition and transcendence to life’s end

Abstract

ABSTRACT The history of the two primary institutions of thought and belief, scientific philosophy and theology, center their discourses on addressing the human inevitability of death. Crucial is how moments of death, as rhetorical situations that enable narrative and technical forms for assigning and responding to death, manifest in rhetorics that work to transition humanity away from fear and are followed by either rhetorics of transcendence of or comfort that embraces an afterlife. Rhetoric is a swivel moment between differentiated treatments of death – one seeking to avoid it, but when it finally arrives, the former embraces and assigns it meaning. Borrowing from both religious and secular illustrations, I argue for a conception of rhetoric as a moment of transition in spontaneous thought as death is permanently accompanied by fear. I demonstrate the case through analysis of two contemporary productions that explore the pre- and post-death narratives as transitions and transcendences: The Third Man Factor and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.