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

2018

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 offic…