Pratchett, speaking through Death, gives readers the comfort that, firstly, the lifespan each person, from pharaohs to wizards, is allocated is logical and right, and not to be borrowed from or extended unless the world is going up in flames, so to speak. A Valkyrie and feasting in the halls of Åsgard anyone? A long walk into a black desert? A reunion with the lover of your youth? A Rightness to the Cycle of Life and Death He knows everything there is to know about the soon-to-be-dead – their life spans, the manner of their deaths, and what they were hoping for after life. Children recognize him instantly, whereas adults look past him and through him, like he is some kind of temporal anomaly or homeless person sleeping on a hot-air vent. He has some difficulty with being human and what goes with that – like clothes, eating, sleeping and children. He rides a real, white horse which he calls “Binky”. But they always do.ĭeath is tall, bony, and polite. Sometimes the recently deceased question why, where, who and what’s going on, or don’t want to go with him. Whenever he appears to someone as a seven-foot skeleton, and talks to them in capital letters, they are dead already (with the exception of Reaper Man, in which he becomes, temporarily, mortal). Reaper Man is part of the Death series, the others being Mort and Soul Music.ĭeath (capital D) is a non-negotiable kind of guy. Terry Pratchett solves the problem of writing appealingly about death by making death one of the most popular and fantastical characters in his Discworld novels – “Death”, a.k.a.
Writing about death Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett (Publisher: Corgi, Dec.
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