Chapter 10 - Death, Cruelty and Magical Humanism in the Fiction of Terry Pratchett

Summary

Through the fathomless depths of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past […] Exactly why this should be may never be known. Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a little fun for once.

—Wyrd Sisters

On March 12, 2015, Sir Terry Pratchett died due to complications from his Alzheimer's Disease, a rare form known as posterior cortical atrophy (PCA). While his publisher issued an announcement expressing grief at his passing and condolences to his loved ones, it was the final series of three tweets issued from his Twitter account that most powerfully affected his many readers and fans. The first read, “AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.” The second read, “Terry took Death's arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.” And finally: “The End.”

To those unfamiliar with Sir Terry's fiction, especially his voluminous Discworld series, it must have seemed a touching send-off (the tweets were written by Sir Terry's personal assistant, Rob Wilkins). To those of us intimately familiar with his writing, it was an emotional gut punch, because it was so perfect an epitaph. Death was a fixture in virtually everything Sir Terry wrote, appearing as a character in every single Discworld novel—sometimes a peripheral visitor to the action come to spirit the dead away, but often too a main character in such novels as Mort, Reaper Man and Hogfather. Though at first glance an overdetermined or even cliche representation—a skeleton with glowing blue eyes bearing a scythe and clad in a flowing, cowled black robe—in every other way, Sir Terry's Death was far more than a personification, developing (over the course of the over forty Discworld novels) any number of idiosyncrasies, not least of which were an inquisitive fascination with mortal beings and a deep fondness for cats.