In his 1999 novel Being Dead, the English writer Jim Crace exploits the potential of literary narrative for exploring the liminal space between dying and death. According to Victor Turner (1969), following Van Gennep (1909/2010), ritual processes briefly open up a space for the liminal, characterised as a state of ‘between-ness’ wherein ambiguity, indeterminacy and a loosening of structural-hierarchical relationships prevail. Within this intermediate zone, a vision of an alternative, radically equitable social dispensation may be glimpsed, dubbed by Turner the ‘communitas’, before existing relationships and social arrangements re-assert themselves. In his novel, Crace re-tells the stories of the lives of his main characters as they languish in a limbo between their murder and the discovery and reclamation of their brutalised bodies. It is, or so his narrator tells us, Crace's intention to supply a ‘version of eternity’ in lieu of the disappearance of that offered by religion. However, the seclusion of his protagonists, in keeping with the ‘multivocal’ character (Turner, 1969, p. 52) of the liminal state, allows Crace to present a plurality of divergent versions of the meaning of his characters' deaths in ironic parallel with one another. In this, I argue, Crace appears to affirm, albeit implicitly, an analogy between aesthetic and ritual practices, thereby endorsing Victor Turner's conception of the dominant ritual symbol as combining material and abstract, physical and spiritual significata (Duflem, 1991, p.6; Turner, 1969, p. 52).