Week 11: “Death With Interruptions” by José Saramago

Hey guys, I decided to read “Death With Interruptions” by José Saramago this week. I chose this book after reading the blurb and found it really interesting. Can you imagine a day when no one dies? I immediately thought about how if this happened in real life, would it really affect us and if so how? I thought it was a really different concept compared to the other books we’ve had so far. We always talk about how often death occurs and how we should live our lives to the fullest and use phrases like “You only live once” since death is so inevitable. However, this novel explores the opposite idea. It makes us think about what would really happen if death stopped occurring. It’s so much more supernatural and more of a fantasy genre, which we haven’t really explored before.

The first thing I noticed while reading the book was the weird capitalization of words. I’m not sure if it was intended to have a meaning behind this, but I noticed that after they used commas, they proceeded to capitalize the following letter, even though it’s not a word that usually requires capitalization. It’s a weird observation, but I wanted to point it out to see if anyone else found it odd or if there’s a meaning behind it. I also found it a bit confusing sometimes reading the dialogue in this novel since they don’t use quotation marks and just use commas in between each character’s dialogue. It’s like a little puzzle to figure out when we switched characters. Also, I found the sentences very long, making it difficult for me to read and concentrate on them because they just felt never-ending, which I didn’t love.

Reading about the people in hospitals who are “admitted in a state of suspended life and who will remain so indefinitely with no possibility of a cure or even of any improvement”, I felt really sympathetic to those who were suffering and would much rather pass than continue to endure the pain. Not only do the patients themselves suffer, but their loved ones must suffer tremendously as well, seeing their family members struggle to continue living in misery. I also didn’t expect the disappearance of death to cause so many complications, especially regarding religion. In the novel, people who believed in God acknowledge that without death, there would be no resurrection and no afterlife. Therefore, there would be no point in having churches. Without death, people started to reevaluate their purpose in life and whether or not there was a higher power they once believed in. I had never thought about all these problems that not having death would cause.  

I remember having conversations with friends about whether or not we’d want to be immortal after watching movies like Twilight since vampires live so long. We always thought it would be so cool to be able to live forever and witness the evolution of humans, technology, the world, and have infinite time to do whatever we wanted, etc. However, after reading this book, it’s clear that immortality is not as “fun” as we thought. 

Discussion Question: After reading this novel, would you still consider the idea of being immortal? If death disappeared in real life, would it be as chaotic as the novel presented?