Mocked with Death: The Tragedy of Overliving
Why do I overlive, Why am I mocked with death and lengthened out To deathless pain? (Paradise Lost 10.773-775)
Derived from Emily Wilson's exploration of tragedy that is concerned with living rather than dying.
“Lives do not always end at the expected time. People go on living even after the moment when they or others feel they should have died. Each of these writers presents a character who experiences an intolerable sense of suffering and loss, and feels that he has lived too long, but, nevertheless, decides to resist suicide.”
Including works where even if suicide is not a concept a character dwells upon, there is a sense of confusion or intense weariness at the continuation of life past a cataclysmic, life-altering event and that moment defines every choice for the rest of their life.
Includes some of her discussed works as well as works that I think fit this concept. Please recommend any books you think will work!
created by fitzfarseer
last updated July, 2026
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Couple of possible suggestions based on this quote and the works I’m familiar with that are already on the list, one older and one more new:
1 - Buffalo Hunter Hunter both for Beaucarne and Good Stab (though in distinct ways).
2 - Colonel Chabert, since it concerns the regime change (and according change in norms) between the Napoleonic Empire and Restoration in France through a Colonel who ”should” have died in battle with the Empire but didn’t, returning to find his wife (who remarried) and a society that seemingly would have preferred if he just stayed dead. Not sure how accessible English translations are.
This is wonderful thank you!!
A longer definition of Wilson's concept per the introduction to her book:
"This book argues that there is a central thread in the tragic tradition that is concerned not with dying too early but with living too long, or "overliving." Lives do not always end at the expected time. Sometimes people go on living even after the moment when they or others feel they should have died. Prolonged old age is one way in which life may seem to go on too long. But even young people may feel that they ought already to have died, when they live on after extraordinary loss. Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Milton were all concerned with the problem of overliving. Each of these writers presents a character who experiences an apparently intolerable sense of suffering and loss, and feels that he has lived too long but, nevertheless, decides to resist suicide. The sense that the central character "should" have died generates an uneasy feeling in the audience or reader that the text itself "should" have ended. These texts therefore challenge Aristotelian notions of tragic structure, in that they go on after the expected moment of ending. Each writer in the tradition tries to contain or suppress the problem, often by suggesting that from some larger cosmic, historical, or divine perspective, the character's life has not, after all, gone on too long. But these strategies are often not entirely successful. Tragedies of overliving disturb the audience or reader by reminding us that life may feel too long and endings may seem to have come too late.
