SOURCE: "Mark Twain and the Dark Angel," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. VIII, No. 2, January, 1967, pp. 181-97.

The confrontation with death, the Dark Angel, is a recurring thematic element in Mark Twain's writtings, from the rhetorical refrain of "Is he dead?" which punctures the narratives of the native guides in The Innocents Abroad to the specter of the spider-squid which lurks in the waters of "The Great Dark," the incomplete manuscript Bernard DeVoto includes in Letters From the Earth. Sometimes the confrontations are frankly autobiographical, sometimes they are elaborations of incidents Twain has merely read or heard about, and sometimes they are purely imaginative, but regardless of their genesis, each represents an earnest attempt to place the fact of death in a tenable perspective. Necessarily, this perspective implies an attitude toward the whole of life. It is the intent of this essay to explore some of the perspectives which Twain's creative imagination allowed him to take.

In Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown writes that "the construction of a human consciousness strong enough to accept death is a task in which philosophy and psychoanalysis can join hands—and also art." If I understand him correctly, what Brown means by a consciousness strong enough to accept death is a consciousness where life and death are reconciled, where they form an organic unity. The conditions of "civilization," however, negate this possibility, and life and death are seen as antithetical.

From boyhood on, neither death nor violence were alien to Mark Twain, as DeLancey Ferguson points out in Mark Twain: Man and Legend:

Young Sam in the course of his boyhood saw a Negro killed when his master flung a lump of slag at his head. He saw old man Smarr shot down in a drunken brawl, and watched the wounded man cough out his life under the weight of a Bible some pious fool had laid upon his chest. He saw the rowdy young Hyde brothers try to kill their uncle—one kneeling on his chest while the other repeatedly snapped an Allen revolver that would not go off . . . He saw a drunken tramp burn to death in the jail, because some of the boys had kindly given him matches and tobacco. One night he saw a drunken ruffian set off with the avowed purpose of raping a widow and her daughter at "the Welshman's," and saw the sequel when the elder woman, after warning the scoundrel to be gone before the count of ten, riddled him with slugs from a steadily aimed shotgun.

The Dark Angel was an intrinsic part of the Hannibal, Missouri, community of Twain's boyhood. He is also an acknowledged element in St. Petersburg, the village where Huck lives in the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn. But Huck is given a perspective toward death which is denied to all the other characters in the novel and which is impossible for Twain himself to assume.

Richard P. Adams, in his introduction to Twain in American Literary Masters, rightly sees the pattern of death and rebirth as the most significant structural element in Huckleberry Finn, but he fails to consider the psychological and philosophical import of the pattern. Nowhere else in Twain's output is the theme of life and death treated more fully, and nowhere else is what Norman Brown calls "the possibility of redemption . . . in the reunification of instinctual opposites" offered as it is in Huck himself.

The theme of death is introduced in the first chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers; and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time, so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people.

Huck does not attach any meanings or values to life that are beyond life. For Huck, death is the act of dying, but even to be dying is an act of living. To be dead is to be external to both living and dying. The antithesis does not exist in Huck's particular perspective.

It would be incorrect to categorize Huck as Adamic in his attitude. As Twain points out in "Reflections on Religion" (published in the Hudson Review, Autumn '63):

To Adam is forbidden the fruit of a certain tree—and he is gravely informed that if he disobeys he shall die. How could that be expected to impress Adam? Adam was merely a child in stature; in knowledge and experience he was in no way the superior of a baby of two years of age; he could have no idea what the word death meant. He had never seen a dead thing, he had never heard of a dead thing before. The word meant nothing to him, If the Adam child had been warned that if he ate of the apples he would be transformed into a meridian of longitude, that threat would have been the equivalent of the other, since neither of them could mean anything to him.

Huck's is not Adam's innocence; Huck has seen death. In a very real sense his response is nonhuman altogether, that is, his awareness is instinctive at almost animal level. Huck's journey brings him into contact with the multiple guises that civilization grants death, and although Huck remains uncorrupted by these encounters and maintains his essential vision, it is only because Twain himself wills it so.

The conclusion of the first chapter juxtaposes life and death in the nonhuman way that Huck acknowledges them. It is after his lesson about Moses and everyone else has gone to sleep for the night except Huck. Listening, Huck hears the wind, an owl, a dog, and a whippoorwill, and each is associated with death. But within nature life and death are not contradictive, that is, the possible outcome of dying plays no role in living. This is essentially Huck's perspective. The world outside the Widow Douglas' house is alive, teeming with noise and pulsing with life, but as Huck himself notes, " . . . the house was all as still as death now." There is a vital distinction. Death, in this case, is "still," and there is no life associated with it. In fact, it is death as antipodal to life.

Houses continually form a viable threat to Huck's very existence. Living within houses means imprisonment to Huck, physically and psychically, for they deny him that perspective which permits a wholeness to the life-death unit and fragments the unit into polarities. Growth under Miss Watson's tutelage is a series of negative imperatives: "Don't put your feet up there, Huckleberry," "Don't scrunch up like that, Huckleberry—set up straight," "Don't gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry—why don't you try to behave?" Each of Miss Watson's attempts to civilize Huck, to regiment his behavior into society's accepted etiquette, even involves physical restriction.

Pap, Huck's father, is essentially a victim of society, yet at the same time he is a representative of that society. In one sense he frees Huck from the restraints of civilization by taking him from the Widow Douglas, but this new freedom becomes imprisonment in the literal sense of the word. Pap takes Huck off to a cabin across the river, but each time he goes into St. Petersburg he leaves Huck locked in the shack. During one of Pap's alcoholic fits, the cabin almost becomes a real house of death for Huck as his father chases him with a knife. When Pap collapses in alcoholic stupor, Huck says, "Then he laid stiller, and didn't make a sound. I could hear the owls and the wolves, away off in the woods, and it seemed terrible still." This reflection echoes the feelings Huck had voiced at the Widow Douglas'.

The associations between houses and death are undeniably established in the episode which has come to be called by critics and commentators "the house of the dead." The house which comes floating down the Mississippi even contains its own corpse, as Huck and Jim discover when they climb into it to see if there is anything they can salvage for their own use.

The stillness of the corpse again illustrates the dual way in which death is regarded: Death as still, the way in which "civilization" regards it, and death as dynamic, the vision of nature. Death as stillness exists where there is no longer life potential. Huck also states, in response to Jim's warning that the corpse is "too gashly" to look upon, that he doesn't want to look at it. Huck's declaration places him on the side of nature.

Huck does manage to effect an escape from the cabin where Pap has imprisoned him. In order to guarantee his freedom Huck is compelled to devise a plan which will liberate him from all future restrictions. The experiences with Pap have been a bitter lesson, and Huck does not wish to jeopardize his liberty again. The means of a complete escape is by a ritual slaying of the self. It is Huck's simulated death that is the agent of his freedom, and this is consistent with his attitude toward death and life, because in his framework, unarticulated, life and death are not antipodal. Dying is living; living, dying. Life is growth, change, potentiality, while death, when opposed to life, is fixed, static, and negative. The pig is slaughtered and evidence is placed to indicate the murder of Huck Finn. For Huck the slaying of the self results in the effacement and freeing of the self. In all subsequent social intercourse, each time he leaves the river for the shore, he assumes a new identity. At one time he is Sarah Williams, and in order to convince the watchman to go out to the Walter Scott and "save" the murderers, he invents a history for himself; he tells Buck Grangerford his name is George Jackson; at the Phelps' farm he even becomes Tom Sawyer.

Immediately after his ritual self-slaying Huck gets into the canoe he has cached in a brake nearby. The slaying becomes even more emphatically a form of rebirth when the river is recognized as a symbol of life in the Freudian tradition. The river itself provides Huck with the means of his escape: The canoe that comes floating downstream. For Huck the rebirth even involves a new awareness of his sense faculties, as if he were discovering them for the first time:

I got out amongst the driftwood and then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float. I laid there and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky, not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before. And how far a body can hear on the water such nights!

The river is really a double symbol. At the same time that it is a symbol of life, it is also a symbol of death. The swift waters which carry the canoe downstream are part of a flood farther upstream. ("The House of the Dead" is also carried downstream by the destructive power of the river.) But the death aspects of the river are integral to its life-giving force. That is, these two qualities, life-giving and death-bringing, are not antithetical. They are in fact part of one force. Huck's perspective toward death and life is identical with the river's reconciliation of these two forces. For Huck, death can free one from life and free one for life at the very same time. Death forms an integral element of the whole.

Huck's attitute toward death is quite different from that manifested by his father, who in his fit of delirium tremens cries out: "Tramp—tramp—tramp; that's the dead; tramp—tramp—tramp; they're coming after me; but I won't go—Oh, they're here! don't touch me—don't! hands off—they're cold; let go—Oh, let a poor devil alone!" The associations Pap makes with death are traditional. For Pap death is a physical thing: It is sensory; it is cold. He has accepted the objective personification of death common among the primitive, the unsophisticated. Pap's vision of death is an emotive response, nonrational, and as if to emphasize this very aspect Twain has Pap deliver his version of death in an alcoholic fit.

The threat of death is very real to Pap, and he believes that the only way he can come to terms with it is to kill the Dark Angel. Pap chases Huck around the cabin, calling him the Angel of Death, and attempts to slay death with a clasp knife, believing that then he will be free of mortality. Because Pap has objectified death, he mistakenly believes that Huck is the Dark Angel. His blurred, blind vision seizes on Huck as the only other being in the room, the incarnation of his fears.

In one sense Pap's mistaken identification of Huck as the Angel of Death is not altogether inaccurate. After his own ritual self-slaying Huck is free of the actual threat of death. (The episode with Pap comes prior to his simulated death, and the one other time he is threatened, the threat is instantly dispersed.) A number of deaths occur throughout the remainder of the book where Huck is a witness.

The first time Jim sees him after the ritual self-slaying, he mistakes Huck for a ghost: "Doan' hurt me—don't! I hain't ever done no harm to a ghos'. I awluz liked dead people, en done all I could for 'em. You go and git in de river agin, whah you b'longs, en doan' do nuffn to ole Jim, 'at 'uz awluz yo' fren'." Later when Huck and Jim have been separated by the fog on the river, Jim's first words on seeing Huck again are: "Goodness gracious, is dat you Huck? En you ain' dead—you ain' drownded—you's back again?" Jim's incredulity is not unwarranted from the traditional perspective, but then Huck offers a vision which is more encompassing. (It should be remarked that the dynamics of this vision occur between Huck and the reader, not between Huck and those he encounters in the progress of the narrative. Huck is not a proselytizer.)

Pap's fear of death is one guise that society has granted the fact of death, but the attitude of the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons places death in an entirely different perspective. The Grangerfords and Sheperdsons have made death acceptable by cloaking it in romanticism and sentimentality. Emmeline Grangerford is the high priestess of the cult of romantic death and, appropriately enough, she herself is dead. Her room has been turned into a shrine, and her paintings have a place on the living room walls. In the series of paintings Twain is burlesquing the stylized response to death: "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas," "I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas," "And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas." These tableaulike drawings represent the stock responses of a sentimental heart. Huck's reaction reflects his philosophy: "These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them . . ." Emmeline's drawings are static, stylized. They are theatrical postures without validity experientially. A flair for the dramatic characterizes the entire Grangeford family—from the elaborate morning greetings to the arrangement of the furniture in the house.

Death has become a way of life for the Grangerfords in their feud with the Sheperdsons. It is a way of life unfamiliar to Huck, as Buck Grangerford discovers to his surprise when Huck asks what a feud is. Huck is surprised in his own turn to learn that Buck does not even know the origins of the feud. He merely subscribes to it without questioning its validity. Huck cannot comprehend this way of life which is committed to death. As Huck sees it, and as Twain sees it, these terms deny any value to life. The values, as Colonel Grangerford points out, are either in killing honorably or dying bravely. This emphasis on death negates the intrinsic wholeness of the life-death unit.

Huck happens to be present when his friend Buck Grangerford falls victim to the terms of death as the way of living. (Huck is in a tree watching the scene below, which hints of Pap's allegation of Huck as the Angel of Death.)

All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns—the men had slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their horses! The boys jumped for the river—both of them hurt—and as they swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing out, "Kill them! kill them!" It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain't going to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn't ever come ashore that night, to see such things. I ain't ever going to get shut of them—lots of time I dream about them.

Huck's moral revulsion at the futility and waste of the feud-life is shared by Twain. Huck's dreams echo Twain's. The romantic, sentimental attitude toward death becomes an anaesthetic, numbing one to the potentialities and possibilities of life. The episode concludes with Huck's reunion with Jim and the renewal of their life on the raft. Huck tells us that he "never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in the middle of the Mississippi."

Huck's encounters with death as a corruption of the life-death unit generate a rhythm. Ashore, death becomes antipodal to life, that is, it is not felt as integral, but is something suspected of being external, separate. It is conceived as something imposed from without, and this is reinforced in the novel by the fact that death generally means being shot. Experience of the river acknowledges the life-death organic unit. One generates the other.

On shore Huck sees the methods by which death, and consequently life, have been corrupted by society, and he is repelled by this vision back to the unpolluted river. Each attempt to reconcile himself with life ashore only makes Huck aware of how impossible the task is.

The Boggs-Sherburn episode emphasizes this pattern. Death is again the central issue. Some commentators have read it as a treatise on mob psychology, but it seems to me that Henry Nash Smith's reading is closer, although he cannot relate Huck's visit to the circus which follows Sherburn's contemptuous speech to the lynch mob. In Mark Twain, The Development of a Writer, Smith sees Sherburn as ultimately a precursor of "the mysterious stranger," and compares his cold-blooded killing of Boggs to Satan's indifferent murders of the small people he has made. He writes that "Sherburn belong to the series of characters in Mark Twain's later work that have been called 'transcendent figures' . . ." However, Satan in "The Mysterious Stranger" is in the literal sense a transcendent figure, whereas Sherburn, after all, is only a man. Sherburn's "transcendent" powers are not manifestations of his supernaturalism but only parts of a pose, similar to that of the Grangerfords and Sheperdsons, The pose is another way of coming to terms with death. Sherburn shoots Boggs without hesitancy, without regret. In his scheme, death is negligible because life is equally so, as he clearly indicates in his speech to the lynch mob. Again Huck is witness.

Huck first encounters Boggs "a-tearing along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an Injun, and saying out—'Cler the track, thar. I'm on the waw-path, and the price of coffins is a gwyne to rise.'" He addresses Huck, asking him if he is prepared to die, but he rides on before Huck can answer. Huck does admit he was scared, but the threat was never really a potent one. Boggs, whooping and hollering "and weaving about in the saddle," is a travesty of the Dark Angel. As one of the townsmen points out, "I wisht old Boggs 'd threaten me, 'cuz then I'd know I warn't gwyne to die for a thousan' year."

Smith points out that the Boggs-Sherburn episode is linked with Twain's own experience, and that the shooting resembles the slaying of "Uncle Sam" Smarr in Hannibal when Twain was only nine. Sherburn shoots Boggs cold-bloodedly, without remorse, for threatening him with death and then contemptuously dismisses the lynch mob which has congregated to avenge Boggs' killing. In this instance neither Huck nor Twain evaluates the episode editorially, as Huck does the Grangerford-Sheperdson feud. But the circus scene which immediately follows the dispersal of the lynch mob offers an imaginative evaluation.

The parallels that can be drawn between this scene and the Boggs-Sherburn episode are too obvious to neglect. What the circus scene does is to reverse the previous situation. The ringmaster can be equated with Sherburn, in that he seems to control life in the ring as Sherburn controlled the mob; Boggs is again drunk, but this time it is the feigned intoxication of a clown-athlete. The audience represents the townspeople, who are merely spectators at both events, as Huck is. The "drunk" pesters to be allowed to ride one of the circus horses, and the ringmaster finally, arrogantly, concedes. The "drunk" frantically attempts to remain astride the galloping horse as the audience howls with glee, and as the townspeople laughed at Boggs. But Huck does not share the crowd's feelings: "It warn't funny to me, though; I was all of a tremble to see his danger." The "drank," shedding layers of clothes, metamorphosizes into a handsome young acrobat to the chagrin of the ringmaster and the pleasure of Huck. The circus scene represents an attempt to check the arrogance of Sherburn, his indifference to both life and death, by checking the arrogance of his prototype, the ringmaster. This reversal of the earlier action is qualified by being set in a circus, a fantasy world. In reality on shore the possibility of metamorphosis does not exist, only the alternatives of Sherburn and Boggs, both equally unacceptable to Huck.

The next major episode in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deals with the Duke and the Dauphin's attempt to steal Peter Wilks' estate from the lawful heirs. It is clear from this episode that Twain thinks death within the framework of civilization has been corrupted and that instead of giving meaning to life, it gives only opportunity for degradation and depravity. It blinds people to the truth, as it blinds Peter Wilks' family and friends to the true identities of the Duke and the Dauphin. For Huck the obsequities to the forms and rituals of death are as much pretense and sham as the Duke and the Dauphin's titles. He even describes the funeral piety in terms of acting; "It worked the crowd," "give the next woman a show." Huck's description of the funeral as an orgy is apt. "I never seen anything so disgusting," Huck concludes, as the Duke and the Dauphin act out their remorse above Peter Wilks' coffin. Huck's remark applies to his other encounters on shore with the phenomenon of death as well.

In Huckleberry Finn Twain seems to be saying that the vision, Huck's perspective, which can give life its full value is that vision which can give death its full value. Huck's encounters ashore with the Dark Angel illustrate the negation of these value possibilities when life and death are seen as opposite poles. Life ashore sees death cutting off life, while Huck is just as aware of death's life-giving possibilities, and as if to firmly underline this thesis Twain ends the novel with the Dark Angel giving life to Huck and Jim again. Jim is freed from his slave status by the Widow Douglas' deathbed gesture, while Huck is finally told that the corpse in the house of the dead was his father, freeing him from authority and reprisal. The pathos of Huckleberry Finn is that Huck's perspective is no longer possible for Mark Twain. It is an imaginative position at best. As Twain himself discovered in Life on the Mississippi, the river herself had been civilized.

In Roughing It, Twain describes what it felt like to be dying:

We were all sincere, and all deeply moved and earnest, for we were in the presence of death and without hope. I threw away my pipe, and in doing it felt that at last I was free of a hated vice and one that had ridden me like a tyrant all my days. While 1 yet talked, the thought of the good I might have done in the world, and the still greater good I might now do, with these new incentives and higher and better aims to guide me if I could only be spared a few years longer, overcame me and the tears came again. We put our arms about each other's necks and awaited the warning drowsiness that precedes death by freezing.

Of course this passage is suspect, placed as it is at the end of a chapter for the greatest possible comic effect—something like the tall-tale teller who ends his narrative by being consumed by the bear. But at least this passage does represent another perspective. The foreboding of the Dark Angel"s presence is expressed in terms of regret. He does not fear death, and in the world of Roughing It death was too frequent to be feared, but it still remains in opposition to life. The perspective is only a stance, and one which Twain shares with the Southwestern humorists. Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, in their introduction to Humor of the Old Southwest, state that these men "sought through humor to reduce this fearful spectre (death) to less awful proportions . . . The reader is taken into a real-unreal place where suffering and ugliness and death do not clash with horseplay so much as they become part of it." It would be impossible to imagine Huck saying what the hero of Roughing It says. Huck would stay alive as long as he possibly could, not because he feared death, but because being alive he had no alternative except to live. He would not be deeply moved by the presence of death. For Huck, death has no presence, only life has presence.

Twain's later writings shift from the perspectives held by Huck and the personna-hero of Roughing It. In "Reflections on Religion" he believes that "the dead are the only human beings who are really well off . . ." and he says in his autobiography that his daughter Jean "has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts—that gift which makes all other gifts mean and poor—death." The Twain who could write this way was a man who could no longer see the value of life. But his attitude toward death is not the romantic and sentimental vision of Emmaline Grangerford. There is no alternative to the disenchantment of the shore. Only Huck could "light out" for the better world because he hadn't been there. Twain had, and it was all the same.

Death becomes release from a life which is essentially dead—that is, dead to the possibilities of self-fulfillment, self-expression. "The Mysterious Stranger" attempts to reconcile the facts of life and death in dream. There is an awakening to a supraconsciousness that includes both life and death, but is beyond them. Huck's consciousness reconciles life and death in life.

Freudian psychology asserts that in dreams going away on a journey can be a symbolic form of dying. The journey motif is central to both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the incomplete manuscript, "The Great Dark." In "The Great Dark" the journey, which is literally to death, occurs within a dream framework.

The central figure in the manuscript, Mr. Edwards, "was thirty-five years old, and seemed ten years younger, for he was one of those fortunate people who by nature are overcharged with breezy spirits and vigorous health, and from whom cares and troubles slide off without making an impression." Mr. Edwards can be seen as Huck reborn at the conclusion of Huckleberry Finn; his wife's motherly solicitude makes him as young as his children. He is the innocent again, the naif, who must make a journey of discovery. Edwards' life suddenly begins anew on board ship in a way similar to Huck's rebirth on the river.

In the world of "The Great Dark," however, there are no shores. The ship sails in pitch darkness—the stars which Huck saw lying on his back in the bottom of the canoe have been extinguished. The Mississippi which Huck came to know has become a black and unfathomable expanse where all the laws of nature have been suspended. The garrulous mate, Turner, tells Edwards that the gulf stream has gone to the devil, and informs him surreptitiously, "Well, you spoke of tonight. It ain't tonight at all; it's just noon now."

The mate's astonishing revelations do not really frighten Edwards. He has the Superintendent of Dreams who he believes is controlling the world. His presence is a justification in Edwards' mind for the terrors of the great dark and for the suspension of nature's laws. Besides, Edwards cannot feel real terror in the nightmare which surrounds him because he does not think it is real. When the Superintendent asks Edwards, "Are you quite sure it [the nightmare voyage] is a dream?" Edwards' self-assurance is suddenly shaken: "It was as if he had hit me, it stunned me so. Still looking at me his lip curled into a mocking smile, and he wasted away like a mist and disappeared." And the Superintendent never reappears. The terrible phenomena of the great dark have to be accepted as reality and not as fantasy. This is an extension beyond the view offered in "The Mysterious Stranger" where the possibility of life as dream still existed.

The first book of "The Great Dark" establishes life at sea as the only life; the second book defines that life in images of death, the most nightmarish of which is the spider-squid. The image of death as a spider also appears in Huckleberry Finn in one of Emmeline Grangerford's unfinished paintings in which a young woman is represented with three sets of arms. But Emmeline has died before deciding which set of arms is best. Buck says that although the woman in the picture has a sweet face "there were so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me." The inhabitants aboard ship in the great dark cannot romanticize death in the way Emmeline Grangerford was capable of doing. Here, too, as in the world of the feud, death is a way of life, but for Edwards, his wife, and his friends, no other possibility exists.

The ship becomes the house of the dead which comes floating down the Mississippi. Edwards, his wife, and family have their own apartment—"chairs and carpets and rugs and tables and lamps and books and everything lovely, and so warm and comfortable and homey; and the roomiest parlor . . . ever struck in a ship too."

All the possible perspectives toward death explored in Huckleberry Finn are denied to Edwards. Be cannot romanticize it as Emmeline Grangerford could—the spider-squid must be accepted on its own terms; and when the Superintendent of Dreams wisps away, the advantage of Sherburn-like assurance is denied Edwards. Even the captain, who must face the threats of the mutineers in a fashion similar to Sherburn's facing the lynch mob, no longer is able to command arrogance and superiority in the face of death. In "The Great Dark" life is seen as horror and death is seen as horror, and there is no possibility of viewing them as a unit with the magic potentialities of fulfillment as Buck does. For Edwards there is no reality beyond the nightmare.

The only human consciousness Twain had discovered that was strong enough to come to terms with death was Buck's. But Buck's perspective could only exist in a special world. Once the river dried up, as even the pitch-like waters of "The Great Dark" do, life is symbolically and literally denied. And when life cannot be understood, neither can the Dark Angel, death.