Three Fictional Deaths Compared with the Near-Death Experience

This study looks at three popular works of short fiction, by Leo Tolstoy, Ambrose Bierce, and Katherine Anne Porter, in which the main character dies at the end. Some similarities between these deaths and recent near-death experience (NDE) accounts are that the characters experience various kinds of distancing from their bodies, light and darkness play a role, and two of the stories include a final life review. The principal contrast is that dying in these stories is a lonely and mostly grim business, unsupported by a process that transcends the individual or by progress toward an afterlife or otherworld. The comparison helps define the modern sensibility about dying that is part of the cultural context for interest in NDEs.