Maria Rilke's The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge

The concept of death as described in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Malte is a young artist who seems to be lost in his own thoughts on life and a multitude of other abstract notions. Throughout this work, which is very reluctantly classified as a novel, the narrator ponders many different areas and concepts about life in the city, with some references to life on the countryside. Furthermore, the speaker presents death in a very unique way, describing it using three different ideas.

The first characteristic about death that Malte provides is that it is intrinsically connected to life. The narrator begins his first entry by stating, “[t]his, then, is where people come to live; I’d have thought it more of a place to die” (Rilke 3). As the entry continues, it becomes clear that the place he is referring to is a hospital, particularly a birthing hospital. By asserting that birthing hospitals are a place to die, Rilke is linking the beginning of life with the presence of death. It is important to note that at the end

He makes this contrast when he asks, “[w]ho cares about a well-made death these days? No one” (Rilke 6). He later says that even the rich, who could have whichever death they wanted, are becoming indifferent. Malte is trying to express that nowadays people are letting go of the control over their death. Another instance in which the speaker compares the present to the past is when he states, “[y]ou die as you happen to die; you die the death that comes with your illness” (Rilke 7). The instances in which Malte has spoken about people dying their own deaths are written in past tense, while this excerpt uses the present tense. This change in verb tense indicates that unlike in years before, people now die whichever death they