SOURCE: "Richard Brautigan's Search for Control Over Death," in American Literature, Vol. 57, No. 3, October, 1985, pp. 434-55.

In the following essay, Horvath describes the efforts of the countercultural heroes in Brautigan 's fiction as they attempt to resist the dominant culture of American society, associated in Brautigan's novels with "dealing and desiring death. "

Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted that "Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through."¹ However, as Kierkegaard and others have forcefully argued, the prospect of death is life's central fact and the repression of this fact life's primary task. For Ernest Becker, moreover, man's heroism lies in his impossible efforts to transcend creatureliness, to deny death by means of "lifeenhancing illusion."² Among such illusions might be placed statements such as Wittgenstein's and the fiction of Richard Brautigan.

As Becker writes early in The Denial of Death, "The irony of man's condition is that...