Mark Reads ‘Reaper Man’: Part 4

In the fourth part of Reaper Man, the wizards try to have the best interests of Windle Poons in mind, but Poons has a much different idea of what’s best for him. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Discworld. 

Trigger Warning: For death, suicide, taphophobia (fear of being buried alive).

I cannot believe that Windle Poons, one of my least favorite characters in the Discworld books prior to this, now possesses one of the most fascinating plots that Pratchett has ever conceived of.

There’s just so much depth to what Poons is experiencing, both in terms of the humor and in terms of the existential epiphany he has while BURIED ALIVE. This might very well be the only instance in any fictional work where someone being BURIED ALIVE (buried undead???) is both hilarious and sad, but not terrifying. How? How is this even real?

I mean, let’s just start here: this section opens with the Archchancellor angrily demanding that Windle Poons’s undead burial happen with dignity. There’s a clear absurdity in what follows this because the idea of politely burying Poons – who is calmly talking and waving the entire time – is too surreal for words. And yet, here we are. It’s happening. Wizards discuss whether or not it is in Windle Poons’s best interest to be staked in the heart and buried at a crossroads, all while he’s very much conscious and right there next to them.

The crossroads sequence itself? It’s alternately incredibly humorous and downright depressing. It is! The fact that the wizards chose one of the busiest intersections is a riot, I can’t deny that. (And during the part where the fruiterer was scolding them, I couldn’t help but think of Cabbage Man from Avatar: The Last Airbender.) The same goes for the absurd conversation the wizards have with Sergeant Colon. He genuinely thought someone was stealing an actual crossroads! CAN WE ALSO TALK ABOUT THIS BEAUTIFUL LITTLE EXCHANGE???

It dawned on the sergeant that he had inadvertently placed himself center stage in a drama involving hundreds of people, some of them wizards and all of them angry.

“What are you doing, then?” he said

“We’re burying our colleague. What does it look like?” said Ridcully.

BLESS THIS SCENE FOR EXISTING. Bless the twisted (yet strangely sensical) logic that Colon uses to come to the conclusion that Windle Poons is actually dead. And bless Pratchett, who is able to go from this sort of wackiness immediately to this:

“I really am very touched, you know,” said Windle, lying back in the coffin. It was quite a good one, from the mortuary in Elm Street. The Archchancellor had let him choose it himself.

Funny? A little bit, sure. But the sincerity here – something we come to see more of from Windle in this section – is utterly real. He really does appreciate what these wizards are doing, perhaps out of a misplaced optimism. I think that he truly hoped that these wizards could kill him. He wanted to die. He wanted to pass naturally, to greet Death, and to move on. So no matter how absurd this little spectacle was, he still held on to the hope that it would work. So they “stake” him with celery, close the coffin lid, and bury him beneath the crossroads of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way.

It doesn’t work.

I wasn’t surprised by that. I did not expect for a minute that it would. Pratchett shocks us, however, but taking Poons in a direction we would not have anticipated, but one that makes sense. It’s entirely believable at this point that the undead are numerous enough that small factions of them would find a way to not only band together, but begin to recruit more members for the support group they’re building. So where’s the best place to advertise for such a thing?

The inside of a coffin!

It’s here that Pratchett speaks openly about life and death, but in a manner that forced me to think about what exactly it meant to be alive:

And it suddenly dawned on the late Windle Poons that there was no such thing as somebody else’s problem, and that just when you thought the world had pushed you aside it turned out to be full of strangeness. He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.

It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane. But It was strange. It had things in it like screws that unscrewed themselves, and little written messages to the dead.

It’s not hard for me to see myself in this, especially since I spent the first 16 years of my life being an onlooker, not “participating” in life as I saw others participating in it. Of course, the metaphor sort of falls apart upon examination only when you try to project it on a personal narrative because, to Windle Poons, I still count as the living. I’m too busy being alive to know exactly what he’s experiencing. But I think there’s a value in examining what Pratchett means by all of this. Do we spend so much time sprinting from one moment in life to the next that we lack an ability to self-examine? Are we so busy and over-scheduled that we can’t appreciate the simple act of being alive? I don’t know quite yet, and I’m actually rather thrilled to see what Pratchett does with Windle Poons. I mean, I love the idea of an undead support group because, frankly, these people need it.

Now, as far as the strangeness of life that’s referenced in the last quote? I suspect that the mysterious snow globes are the cause of all the chaos, and there’s a part of me that feels like the Discworld’s power of belief is at work, except… well. It doesn’t quite fit, does it? I thought that maybe shit was flying around everywhere, with a life of its own, because everyone was shaking the little snow globes, except there’s no snow. And why aren’t the people flying around, aside from Ridcully? Wouldn’t it feel like a constant earthquake?

I DON’T GET IT.

I was also quite pleased to finally get an update on what Death was up to. There’s something very satisfying about the idea of him helping out an older woman who long ago stopped needing all that much assistance in her life. Miss Flitworth has a no-nonsense attitude to her that I like, and it’s clear that her interest in Death’s strangeness doesn’t prevent her from hiring him. But this relationship has to eventually become somewhat challenging, won’t it? She doesn’t ask personal questions, sure, but Death – er, rather, Bill Door – is so weird that it’s going to be inevitable. And I don’t think that Death is going to be all that secretive about his past. Eventually, that is.

So what happens next??? I’M SO EXCITED TO FIND OUT.

The original text contains use of the words “stupid” and “idiots.”

Mark Links Stuff

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About Mark Oshiro

Perpetually unprepared since '09.
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