Death, Daemon, and Creation : Death in Muriel Spark's Fiction

Abstract

In many of Muriel Spark's novels, plots are focused on death, or death is caricatured. The dead tell stories and walk with vigorous strides in the world of her fiction. The boundary between life and death is obscure, and narrators, who come and go across it, make living people's existence insecure. Spark weaves and manipulates plots very consciously as the omniscient author. Her characters plan and act on their own accord, believing they have their free will, but their activities are seen through and controlled by the author. In Spark's fiction, 'plot' means conspiracy by the author, and her conscious manipulation of plot is closely related to her fiction's metafictional nature. In this manipulation of plot, death plays an important role. Spark makes use of death cruelly and indifferently as fictional devices. Death forms an essential factor in Sparkian plot manipulated by the author as a fictional device. Ghosts reveal the relationship between death and creation in Spark's novels. Writing fiction is an operation made through spiritual beings. Reality itself is uncertain for Spark, and life becomes real only when it is cut off by death and made distinct in contrast to death. Because death mediates between this world and another world, the Sparkian world of fiction can be created.