Abstract

The question of death is perhaps the most daring question through the history of human beings. In the Western philosophical tradition death is mostly depicted as an event, a coming of a final chapter of every human's life with which his course of life concludes its narration. Except Martin Heidegger whose conception of death is the existential constitution of human being, announcing and revealing the Nothing of the world. He interprets death as a way of life, alongside the Nothing that equally shapes the meaning of every experience. Literature can best exemplify such a living death through narratives of the Nothing of Heideggerian world. To this end, the current paper studies a Persian novel, Symphony of the Dead (2001) by Abbas Maroufi. In this discussion, methodology is explicitly the phenomenology of death which Heidegger explicates in Being and Time (1927), and it concluded that death is experienced not as an event, but the unifying structural necessity in which past and present are only possible in the future dying experience. It also concludes that dying as a way of life not only overshadows death as an event, but is also the ultimate ground for the possibility of such thinking of death.

Key words: Abbas Maroufi, anxiety, being and time, dasein, death, temporality.