Death (Discworld)
Death is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and a parody of several other depictions of the Grim Reaper across Europe. He is a black-robed skeleton who usually carries a scythe and on occasion a sword for dispatching royalty. His jurisdiction is specifically the Discworld itself; he being only a minion of Azrael, the Death of all things across the Universes – in much the same way as [|the Death of Rats] is an infinitesimally small part of Death himself.
Pratchett explores human existence through his depiction of death, which becomes more sympathetic throughout the series as it progresses.
Death almost never kills anyone or anything, but — acting in the form of a psychopomp — he merely ensures that when lives come to an end, they move on to where they believe they should go if they are sentient, which often involves a desert to be crossed.
Works
Death appears in every single Discworld novel — to greater or lesser degree — except for The Wee Free Men and Snuff. In some of the novels, he is just a momentary humorous aside, whereas in others he has a more significant bearing on a plot point.The character of Death evolves over the progression of the novels, developing more across the earlier books with his character gradually stabilising in later ones.
Death is the leading or an important central character in the following — in which he goes through significant character development — and these are considered to be the Death strand novels:
- Mort — 1987
- Reaper Man — 1991
- Soul Music — 1994
- Hogfather — 1996
- Thief of Time — 2001
Character
Death is not invisible, but most people's brains refuse to process who he is unless he insists. Generally, only magical people like witches and wizards, children, and cats can allow themselves to see him. Death can ignore things like walls because he is eternal and things that last mere centuries are not as real as he is. He can also adjust time for himself and others nearby.
Wizards, witches, and other significant figures like kings are collected by Death himself rather than by some lesser functionary such as a scrofula. Death himself must collect some minimum number of souls, to keep the balance. His selection from ordinary deaths is worked out by a system called the "nodes" possibly based on the showiness of the death. A common thief incinerated by a dragon might qualify for example. He has shown up for at least two kittens, a swan, and a red flower-like sea creature. These events are usually of incidental importance within the story, so Death's appearance may be considered an in-joke rather than a plot device. He sometimes appears for characters in mortal peril. Rincewind has seen him on numerous near-fatal occasions. Similarly, in Thud!, Vimes has a near-death experience, for which Death appears, sitting in a deckchair reading a mystery novel as he waits to see if Vimes will die.
He is fond of cats, who can see him at all times, and curry, the consumption of which he describes as like biting a red-hot ice cube. Being a skeleton with no digestive organs, it is not revealed how he is able to partake of food and drink. Anyone who dines with him tends to become extremely focused upon their own meal, and merely notices Death's plate being full one moment and empty the next. He occasionally smokes a pipe, with the smoke drifting out of his eye sockets. He pays for goods and services with an assortment of copper coins, many turned blue or green with age, which he says he acquired.
Death is fascinated by humanity. His interest is coupled with bafflement: it's a favorite point of Pratchett's that the habits and beliefs that are grown into instead of being rationally acquired are an essential part of being human. As Death is an outside observer, his imitations of humanity are intricate but marked by a fundamental lack of comprehension. When acting as a stand-in for the Hogfather he starts by greeting the children with from force of habit until reminded not to do so. He is especially intrigued by humanity's ability to complicate their own existence, and their ability to actually get up in the morning without going insane from the sheer prospect of what life entails.
This fascination with humanity extends to the point of sympathy towards them, and he will often side with humans against greater threats, notably the Auditors of Reality. He has on a number of occasions bent the rules to allow a character extra life. Death has also indicated that he will oblige dying humans by playing a game with them for their lives, much like the personification of Death in The Seventh Seal; the games he offers include chess, though he consistently has trouble remembering how the knights move, and another game, which the challenger lost despite having "three streets and all the utilities". Granny Weatherwax was able to play cards against Death in a successful bid to save a child's life, Granny's hand having four queens while Death's had only four "ones".
In the same way that his granddaughter, Susan, has been described as "Helpfulness Personified" in terms of her personality, Death, by his own admission, could very well be described as 'Duty Personified' in terms of personality; in Hogfather, in a discussion with Albert, Death comments He does not cause people to die, nor does he concern himself with their goodness or badness in life; it is simply his job to collect their souls at the appointed time.
In many ways, he epitomizes the bleakness of human existence. In Reaper Man, in which he is rendered temporarily mortal, he becomes frustrated and infuriated with the unfair inevitability of death, a theme that continues through later books. In Soul Music he expresses misery at the fact that he is capable of preventing deaths but is forbidden to do so; during his time as the Hogfather, he uses his new dual role to save a little match girl from dying of the cold by employing a loophole through giving her the gift of a future, thus allowing him to avoid the usual complications that arise from his breaking the rules. Despite his general lack of emotion, the Auditors of Reality are one of the few things actually capable of angering him. He also gets angry upon hearing of Rincewind: In Eric, for example, his eyes turn red at the mention of Rincewind. Pratchett even says in The Art of Discworld that he has received a number of letters from terminally ill fans in which they hope that Death will resemble the Discworld incarnation — he also says that those particular letters usually cause him to spend some time staring at the wall.
Death has developed considerably since his first appearance in The Colour of Magic. In this, he was quite a malicious character and followed Rincewind around wanting him to die after circumstances resulted in Rincewind missing his scheduled appointment. At one point he even deliberately stops a character's heart, though later in the book it was shown to have been the actions of Death's stand-in, Scrofula. By the time of Mort he had gained the sympathetic and humorous personality he has in later books. In later novels he has been used to examine developments in theoretical physics as, being supernatural, he is able to witness such events firsthand although, being a cat lover, he is not fond of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, believing it cruel to the cats involved.
Home
Death resides in an extra-dimensional realm called Death's Domain. His home there is a Victorian house with a well-tended garden in shades of black and a skull and crossbones motif. Its name is "Mon Repos",, and it is much larger inside than outside. Death has not mastered scale, not understanding real distance nor perspective either, so its surroundings are blurred and seem distant. Death adds a large golden wheat field to the grounds after the events of Reaper Man. A tree swing he built for his granddaughter Susan, swings through the trunk of the tree.The doors reach a height of several yards yet are only a few feet tall. He has a bathroom which he never uses, with a bar of bone-white, rock-hard soap and a towel rack with hard towels, not knowing that towels are soft and should be foldable. Plumbing confuses him, and the pipes are completely solid. He never sleeps and has a violin he tries to play. He notes in Soul Music that he can only play "an empty chord," the sound made at the end of everything to signify no more sound.
Death's house is full of cats. He also sends cats to heaven where Maurice encounters Death.
Death's gender
The initial books did not pronounce themselves about the sex of Death, using the pronoun "it", although Ysabell called him 'Daddy'. In Mort, Death's pronoun is given as "he" and "his" without the special capital as in the earlier books. Also, when he goes to an employment agent, the agent refers to him as "Mister …", unable to recall his name to start. In Reaper Man, Death is unambiguously identified as a male, and in Soul Music and Hogfather Susan calls him her grandfather or "Granddad". When asked to describe Death, in the second Discworld computer game, the protagonist Rincewind hazards a guess, "Well, I suppose he's a man. You have to look at the pelvis, don't you?" In the comic strip adaptation of Mort, Death is seen in mirrors as a black-bearded human wearing a black cloak, a look he takes when he needs to be seen by the living.Many languages must provide a grammatical gender to each object, and 'death' is often a feminine noun. As such, translations of early novels sometimes refer to Death as a woman. This is generally changed, by the time of Reaper Man. Also, the personification of Death varies from country to country leading to further confusion; for example the Russian personification is that of an old woman, while the Czech version uses for his name a normally nonexistent masculine variant of the feminine word for death. Explanations are given in footnotes, often with a pun.