AS A SIGNIFIER OF ABSENCE, death animates us to engage in representation. J. Hillis Miller writes that “storytelling is always after the fact, and it is always constructed over a loss.” Because death imparts ultimate finality to life and cannot be directly experienced firsthand, it has consistently played a major role in literary texts throughout history. Yet it arguably undergoes a transformation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Alan Friedman contends that “during the modernist period, death in Western culture and literature differs radically from what it was before and after.” And while Friedman dutifully follows the convention of literary studies by identifying modernism with the period from 1890 to 1940, he privileges high modernism. He states, “I will, for example, argue at times that modernism is bracketed by the two world wars.” During these interwar years, death acquires a particular urgency and poignancy, and it is no coincidence that the novels examined in this book all feature death as a major trope, with the possible exception of Das Schloss, which Kafka reportedly intended to end with the protagonist's demise. At the very center of Woolf's To the Lighthouse are deaths of Mrs. Ramsey, Prue, and Andrew; fatal disease is ubiquitous in the sanatorium depicted in Mann's Der Zauberberg, which ends with Hans Castorp heading toward an almost certain death on the battlefield; and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying recounts the Bundren family's encounter with the loss of its matriarch. These novels are emblematic of literary modernism during the 1920s, for mortality also pervades T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Rainer Maria Rilke's Duineser Elegien and Sonette an Orpheus, Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Katherine Mansfield's Garden Party, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, as well as many others.

What distinguishes high modernism in this regard is that it refuses to resolve the loss associated with death. For Patricia Rae, death and any subsequent mourning is intentionally left unsettled in modernist literary works.