What does it mean to be alive or to be dead? You can read the story of “The Dead” as you like. For example, you can surrender to ease and accept its story. But there are many ways to read this story, it depends on who is reading, the number of ways of reading is sometimes as many as the readers themselves. This applies to a few texts; Few are
Texts whose end cannot be certain, or a clear end to it, not with regard to the narration line and its plan, but rather in reflecting on that during/after reading. The moment the reader prepares to add another icon to his incomplete record of reading stories and novels, of arranging narrations, of turning to them, of loving them, or vice versa, is the moment when the reading ends; Unless the reader rearranges his preferences and implements a new iconography that concerns him alone. The “dead,” as it attracts us before it turns at its end on an endless beginning, like the small novels of each of Kleist, Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Beckett … forms with it a hidden and prestigious lineage, it ends like another small novel, “Bartleby” by Herman Melville . Bartleby looks asleep, or he looks dead, or you'll never know unless you touch him and feel his limbs. Gabriel looks asleep, or looks dead, or you'll never know unless you go into the room at Gresham's, or if Greta wakes up on a morning that isn't an ordinary morning, but does Greta wake up one morning unless Gabriel wakes himself up?'
Number of pages: 94
