On the Way to Death: Essays Toward a Comic Vision

On the Way to Death completes Eckardt's astonishing trilogy on the interrelationship of comedy, death, and God. It addresses itself to the question of death as the basic incongruity of life. Here is opened to human view the final divine comedy: a total reversal of the traditional roles assigned to God and humankind, a comical denouncement of the terror of death. On the Way to Death follows Sitting in the Earth and Laughing and How to Tell God From the Devil to complete A. Roy Eckardt's trilogy on comedy, the devil, and God. Soren Kierkegaard attests that "it is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic". Composed within this frame of reference, the foundation of this volume is its analysis of the terror of death for human beings. In this context, Eckardt maintains that the all-decisive truth is that humankind never asked to be, but has been thrown into existence. Accordingly, it is immoral - or even diabolical - to blame human beings for the terrible evils of life, including the specter of death. Human beings are proximately responsible for evil, but never ultimately responsible.