The Road to Freedom?

Through an analysis of two works by the British philosopher, Simon Critchley, one of fiction and one a reflection on suicide, the article considers the role of narcissism in a certain kind of death-centred fiction. The claim being made is that a certain complacency in literature's vocation for aestheticizing suffering may obscure a more lucid account of the ego and its travails. This situation is linked to a playful tradition in British fiction that brings together pessimism and a foregrounded cleverness or literariness; the Necronautical Society to which Critchley belongs and to which he frequently refers is taken as an example.