The Aesthetics of Death: Reflections on the honorable suicide from the texts of Mishima

The objective is to show the aesthetic purpose of the life of Yukio Mishima (1925 - 1970), led the way, and the way led in parallel with his literary career. His whole life was conducted by the maxim that "the way of the samurai is death," maximum accepted as an honorable and patriotic truth. For confirmation of this thesis, whose works were selected characters are samurai like The Hagakure: The Ethics of the Samurai and Modern Japan, and the texts in which the author reflects on the Japanese theme Bushidō (Samurai Code of Ethics), as Confessions a masquerade, something autobiographical work, Sun and Steel, and the Sea of ​​Fertility tetralogy. Special attention will be devoted to the tale Patriotism, 1961, whose plot focuses almost exclusively in the ritual of seppuku (commonly known as Harakiri).

FROM DREAM TO NIGHTMARE: DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS

The speech of romance, Death With Interruptions, play with the serious and the comic describing life, replete of conventions, of ten million habitants at an unnamed country. The characters are destituted of personal identity and assume collective identities. The artistic text shows itself fulfilled by a stubborn critic that denounces revolt, forged by the sensation of disaggregation and loss of values and the verification of a picture of misery, injustice and inconsequence, that results from a greedy run of interests. The narrator uses irony to personal and collective attitudes, the unused situations and the very idea of death and god. The text shows itself full of denounces, related to the general state of disaggregation. Split in two cores (the momentary interruption of death activities and the return to hers works), the narrative speech establish a reality, pervade by fantastic, that forces us to a metaphysics reflection about the insoluble enigmas that surrounds the human existence. Death suffers a humanization process, as a tentative to bring her closer to the human kind, to her exact place. Keywords: romance; death; identities.