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What Is The Theme Of Death In The Garden Party And Frankenstein

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Death as a theme in literature is as old as the concept of literature itself. Experiencing someone important to oneself dying is something most human beings can connect to. The difference is how one perceives death and how one deals with it on an emotional level. There are countless examples of books with different, unique interpretations of death but this essay will focus on just two: Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both of these stories have main characters that must come to terms with death but the ways they go about it and the conclusions they come to are vastly different. Death is used as a literary device to show the benefits of letting go and acceptance of things that people can not change in both The Garden Party and Frankenstein by showing opposite ways one can handle death and the results of those choices.
Death in The Garden Party evolves from being a horrible thing that happens to be a beautiful, peaceful conclusion of someone's life. This change in perception comes to the main character, Laura, as she matures from a child into an adult. As Laura changes throughout the story she goes from treating death as a tragedy to accepting it as a natural event in everyone’s life. After she visits the woman whose husband died the narrator states “What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things” (Mansfield 81). This interpretation of Laura’s feelings by the narrator shows how now she

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