Responding to a Tragedy: Analyzing the Reactions to Death of Clara and Werner

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Wick #000844-xxx

Colin J. Wick

Candidate #000844-xxx

World Literature One

February 17, 2009

Responding to a Tragedy: Analyzing the Reactions to Death of Clara and Werner


When confronted with death, individuals tend to show their core personalities and intrinsic values.  In the novels The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, and Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, the authors create characters that show striking similarities in their initial reactions to the deaths of other characters.  Both characters, Clara and Werner, immediately distance themselves from a death, in which they consider themselves partially responsible.  However, the two characters ultimately react differently to the deaths they experience.  Clara eventually reconnects, and in fact, further develops a relationship with what she originally distanced herself from: the physical world; while Werner, contrastingly, further distances himself from Pechorin, because in the end, his principles continue to conquer his emotions.

In both novels, Clara and Werner demonstrate similar responses to events leading up to and during the death of another character, as they both slowly begin to feel disconcerted and shelter themselves from the death itself.  Clara showed these characteristics during the funeral of her sister Rosa, when instead of paying her respects to her sister “with a kiss on her cold forehead” as the rest of her family had done, she instead refused “to go anywhere near the dining room” (Allende 31), and “began to shake” when she saw her “sister’s snow-white legs and naked feet” (Allende 38).  Clara was so perturbed by the tragic death of her sister, that she blatantly refused to even be in the same room as she, and was unable to tolerate seeing her sister in such a vulnerable state.  This vulnerable state is revealed to the reader by the way that Allende uses diction that shows Rosa’s particularly exposed condition. The words “snow-white” and “naked” both have implications of defenselessness and exposure, causing the reader to feel empathy for Clara’s apparent discomfort.  In this way, Clara isolated herself from the world around her, “feeling within her the silence of the entire world”, which allowed her to avoid any association with the death of her sister and the pain it caused her.  Likewise, Werner began to exhibit similar disturbed characteristics leading up to the killing of Grushnitsky, and felt uncomfortable with the idea of killing another man.  Similar to Clara’s shaking, Werner turned “paler than Grushnitsky” (Lermontov 154) while reloading Pechorin’s weapon, and immediately after Pechorin had succeeded in killing, he “turned away in horror” (Lermontov 155).  Werner’s physical reaction to the idea of death, coupled with his immediate silence after the killing, show a striking similarity between the feelings of Werner and Clara towards the idea of death.  Clara’s shaking and Werner’s pale face shows the two become similarly distressed when confronted with the notion of death, or even death itself, which causes them both to retract from the world around them: in Clara’s case through isolation and in Werner’s through silence.

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Furthermore, Clara and Werner share a similar reaction after first having reflected on the atrocity they witnessed, as they both completely separate themselves from what they see as the source.  For example, after witnessing the vivid, and in many ways, disturbing autopsy of her sister, where a young man whom Clara “had never seen before kissed Rosa on the lips, the neck, the breasts, and between the legs”, Clara felt the “silence of the entire world” weigh down upon her causing her to embrace that silence for nine years (Allende 39).  During her prolonged period of silence, Clara invented a ...

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