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RESEARCH PRODUCT

"Once a year the dead live for one day": Disease, Death and Decay in Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano"

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Fittingly for the major preoccupations of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, its action takes place on the Day of the Dead. Yet the carnivalesque, affirmative aspects of the Mexican holiday are hardly depicted in the text. Instead, it is obsessed with the shadow of imminent death emanating from Geoffrey Firmin, the alcoholic protagonist, who, on the macrocosmic scale, represents the apocalypse of the world on the brink of war. References to physical and mental disease, decay and death abound: the Consul’s deteriorating health, paranoid delusions and mental breakdown due to his dipsomania; his and Yvonne’s eventual deaths; Firmin’s alleged involvement in the burning alive of the German officers in the furnaces of S. S. Samaritan; the central figure of the Indian dying by the roadside; the repeated rule regarding the transportation of a corpse by train; Yvonne’s child who died of meningitis and an anonymous child’s funeral. Additionally, the wasteland of Under the Volcano reflecting the Consul’s dying soul and his fate includes plants withering in decayed gardens, ruined churches and castles, cemeteries, the barranca, the ravine splitting Quauhnahuac, the cantina called La Sepultura, or vultures, scorpions, snakes and pariah dogs prominent in the animal world. Intertextual connections, allusions and references reinforce the central themes of the novel: the Bible, particularly the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, Greek mythology, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Dante’s Inferno, or the ubiquitous advertisements for Las Manos de Orlac, to name just a few.