Essay Questions

What is the significance of the novel’s title?

The novel’s title is a reference to the eponymous character who remains unnamed throughout the story. This is deliberate as the author intentionally wants the reading audience to identify with the character regardless of their respective backgrounds. The titular character has also been written to be as average as possible in most every human aspect, and to embrace no particular creed or religious ethos, and no strong moral inclinations. This has been done to cause the reader to participate in the assessment of Everyman’s life and in so doing the reader backhandedly thinks about his or her own choices and systems of belief that they have chosen to espouse.

What does the Everyman’s remains symbolize in the novel?

The remains of the Everyman is discussed in its stages of life, and it is used as a symbol of the inevitability of death and the great preoccupation of people with their bodies and appearances. As a young man his body is described as strong, he is active and full of life. His body then begins to weaken as he ages and his body is subjected to many operations to save his life as he acquires diseases over the passing of the years. The encounter with aging and illness creates feelings of dissociation between the Everyman and his body, a longing for the past, as well as a more pronounced sense of his mortality. These feelings experienced by the Everyman are used to mirror most everyone’s engrossment with their own bodies and ultimately their own impermanence. A particularly poignant example of this musing of human perishability is when Everyman recalls himself as a young boy seeing another young patient like himself about to undergo an operation. The fate of the young boy is never concretely disclosed and he never returns to the ward the Everyman is in. The sudden, unexplained absence of the young lad creates in him a feeling of the suddenness of death. Another example of his morbid musings is when he encounters a decaying corpse of a sailor on the shore. The jarring sight of the corpse moves him to confront the ugly, inescapable reality of death.

How is the theme of the inevitability of death discussed in the novel?

The novel is ultimately about human impermanence and it presents death as a horrible, implacable event that everyone will face at some point in their life. The theme is discussed through the Everyman character, posthumously—no surprise there—and all his musings upon human life, existence, and the nature of death are learned through the echoes and recollections from those visiting his wake. The readers learn of his personal history through the character Nancy linking his ancestry not through the lives they led but through the common place where they are interred. Later it is revealed that as a person Everyman had a morbid awareness of death as an irrefutable reality as well as an indeterminate menace, even as a young child. The is first confronted by death when he comes face to face with the body of a sailor in an advanced stage of decay washed up on the beach near their vacation home and then again when he undergoes an hernia operation. His awareness of death is formed even through the experience of it through those around him: the boy in the hospital ward, his colleagues, his parents, and eventually his fellow retirees at the old folks home he stays in. The Everyman makes the grim conclusion that his life has been a game of cat and mouse with death, but it is a fixed game in which he will eventually and certainly lose.