Everyman (Novel) Literary Elements

Allegory, Morality Fiction, Literary Fiction

Early 2000’s with some flashbacks from the 1990’s; New York, New York; Elizabeth, New Jersey

An anonymous, omniscient, omnipresent, third-person narrator who is aware of each characters’ inner thoughts. The narrator speaks in the third person and centers primarily on the life, private musings and emotions felt by the Everyman. The narration occasionally shifts to other relatives and friends of the Everyman during the wake, and even the Everyman himself as evidenced in the infrequent use of the first person “I” narration.

Melancholy in narrating the Everyman’s life and experiences of milestones, loneliness, illness, and musings on death. There is also a defined air of wistful nostalgia in describing the Everyman’s childhood.

The nameless Everyman is the protagonist of the novel and although there is no antagonist per se, the Everyman’s fear of his own mortality effectively makes death something that haunts him and fills him with great anxiety—enough to treat the idea of death as an antagonist of sorts.

He is confronted with the reality of death as a young boy of nine when he comes across a decaying corpse of a sailor that washes up on the beach near their summer vacation home and again when he has an hernia operation. The Everyman then comes to fear the oblivion of death and wrestles to make peace with aging, his desires, and his own mortality.

In confronting his fear of death the Everyman phones three friends to ask about the sufferings they’ve recently endured—everything from terminal illness, a death in the family, to recovering from hospital confinement—and he comes to the conclusion that death is inevitable and that most everything he has endured was just a delaying of the certainty of death.

The entire novel is told in a non-linear, non-chronologically sequenced order starting from the Everyman’s wake. This sets the tone for the entire novel as being largely about death and other musings concerning mortality and the impermanence of human life. Although certain key events in the Everyman’s life are told through flashbacks, his recollection of the boy he shares a hospital ward bed with that is surrounded by doctors and nurses trying desperately to keep him alive is eerily reminiscent of his own impending death when he is surrounded by doctors and nurses fighting to keep him alive as an old man.

“…Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way…” The quote from the Everyman when speaking to his daughter Nancy frames his stoic philosophical guiding principle in life, and ultimately how he is trying ingrain this credo to her. His advice is to face fears by meeting it with a combination of unyielding stubbornness and yielding to the situation but without giving in to grief allowing a child to ease a child into facing the reality of suffering without denying the difficulty involved in it. The Everyman uses this approach to facing life’s challenges by treating it as an opponent to face in combat and/or as a mere chore that must be done in order to get over it.

Everyman is the same title of a fifteenth-century English morality play. The appropriately named protagonist is taken by Death and is tasked to give an account of his earthly life before God.

The whole narrative of the novel, although it covers a man’s life from his youth to his twilight years, is framed by his death and his preoccupation with evading it. The novel begins with his funeral wake, his family ancestry is traced through the plot of land that his family is buried in at the graveyard, his earliest memories involve the decomposing remains of a sailor that he discovers while on vacation. The entirety of his life experience is woven into the framework of death.

Although the narrative reads like a biography covers his life from youth to old age, the story is framed by his death and assorted contemplations regarding the finality of life.

When he is surrounded by doctors and nurses fighting to keep him alive as an old man he has an experience of deja vu recalling the boy he shared a hospital ward bed with once when he was to undergo an operation for his hernia. The boy was similarly surrounded by doctors and nurses trying desperately to keep him alive—now eerily reminiscent of his own impending death.

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In the this quote “…He’d married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he’d been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story…” Death is described like a relentless pursuer that the Everyman had been trying all his life to escape. In fact, the quote now frames the severity and centrality that evading death has now taken up in his life now that he is in his last years of life.