Summary

This chapter opens with Thomas Mann's criticism of the double suicide of writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte. This incident used to demonstrate how death and suicide are private moments made public. Li writes that the intense emotion that survivors feel after a suicide unjustly demands an explanation and the right to judge that explanation. Li writes that "one's wish to die can be as blind and intuitive as one's will to live, yet the latter is never questioned" (51). She equates suicide with melodrama which alienates and discomfits unlike tragedy which elicits compassion. However, she considers these definitions to be a misunderstanding of melodrama which "meets no one's expectation but its internal need to feel" (52). Although the world will always quote Thomas Mann, Zweig's "silence prevails" (53).

Li writes about people she has known who...