Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death does not qualify as the "ultimate revelation" [that is, a completely honest presentation of another's dying and one's own response to that experience, but it comes close] … to a confrontation with the inappropriate death of a loved one, in this instance her mother. But even in this narrative, disclosure is balanced by unconscious suppression, as we witness how a sensitive literary intelligence (when writing from her own point of view) has difficulty exploring all the implications of mortality. One is tempted to conclude that art alone liberates the imagination to probe the darkest corners of the arena where man contends with the experience of dying—his own and others'. It seems that de Beauvoir's literary intuition taught her this, because she organizes the chronicle of her mother's death around an alternating pattern of present scene and past recall so that the...