Heidegger’s Death Manifested in Magaret Edson’s W;t and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

This paper aims to overcome the fear of ‘a dirty death’ manifested in Margaret Edson’s W;t and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis through Heidegger’s view of death. Philippe Aries describes postmodern death as the dirty death: all the tubes and medical devices in hospital intensive care units save the lives of patients in a comatose state, but they also threaten modern man with a new horror of death. As part of the dirty death, the dying person experiences hypocritical behavior and indifference from family and doctors. Likewise, protagonists in Edson’s W;t and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis experience the dirty death amidst the hypocritical words and indifference by their family and doctors due to the sudden appearance of death. However the fear of the dirty death in the contemporary society can be overcome by Heidegger’s view of death. Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Being and Time. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue. In the anticipation of death (Vorlaufen zum Tode), Dasein is freed from the immersion of temporal values and recover the possibility of its authentic self that had been concealed. As the anticipation of death, protagonists are confronted with their ownmost, non-relational, and unsurpassable possibilities as the temporal values they clung to became meaningless. Therefore this paper will take note of the dirty death which dying Vivian and Gregor experience by family members and medical doctors in the hospital. Then this paper will examine how the protagonists overcome the dirty death through Heidegger’s view of death.