Death

Throughout the novel, sinister images presenting death in terms of claustrophobia and degradation compete for dominance with a less brutal vision: death as crossing over to the other side. As Lorenzo wrestles with his conflicting feelings about Lula, he struggles to come to terms with losing her when he was young, but also with the finality of the loss, now that he has come to witness her burial.

The “ugliness” of the funeral itself repulses Lorenzo, while the “sour smell” of the church and the “bloated bureaucracy” of the funeral home are both evocative of corpses (75). There is a contradiction in Lorenzo’s thinking, however, since his oft-expressed horror of decomposition coexists with a more complicated anxiety, regarding death’s ability to erode human identity. With this mindset, embalming is a worse process to visualize than rotting: the body is unable to “release its own fluids...