In this essay I will be examining the protagonist Niels Lyhnes naturalistic ambitions in J.P. Jacobsens novel Niels Lyhne (1880), more accuratley how the novel Niels Lyhne succeedes as a naturalistic novel through the failure of the protagonist Niels Lyhnes own ambition to live by the ideals of naturalism. Niels remains throughout his life a strong atheist because, in his childhood, God did not answer his prayers to save his dying aunts life. His atheism and his naturalistic ambitions turn into, which I will show, a form of idealism. This could be viewed as inevitable. To renounce ones belief in something also means that one embraces a belief in something else, even if this ”something” is the lack of what one used to believe in. Niels Lyhnes failure, however, means that the book Niels Lyhne succedes as a naturalistic novel. What Jacobsen has achieved is to depict man as the incomplete creature that she is.

This thesis is a study of the ways in which the fear of death, and its natural consequence, the desire for immortality, is manifested in the major characters of three post-Romantic works. In each case, the fear of death is unconscious, and has to "be interpreted from the dreams and illusions of the characters, which may not appear to have any immediate connection with death or immortality. In Madame Bovary, the blind man is the symbolic antithesis of Emma's dreams of finding a means of transcendence within the world itself. He is the embodiment of the horrifying vision of biological process that lies at the heart of her flight from reality. The pharmacist, Homais, is also considered to be attempting to establish a symbolic form of immortality for himself through the glorification of his reputation and his sentimental belief in scientific progress. In Niels Lyhne, the young hero attempts to free himself from the romantic influences of his childhood by proclaiming a new philosophy that is based, on atheism. However, his temperamental attachment to the idea of "infinity", and his inability to accept the physical nature of human beings betray his unconscious desire for a state of being in which he will be invulnerable to the forces of aging and death. In John Gabriel Borkman the three major characters attempt to find a means of denying the inevitability of their approaching deaths. Borkman tries to gain control over the forces of life through the exercise of power and through an identification with rocks and metal that seem to hold the promise of conferring their immutability onto him. Borkman's wife wants her son to devote his life to the glorification of the name of Borkman, that her husband has dishonoured. She hopes that her idealized self-image will live on"in the "monument" that Erhart will "erect" to the family name. Ella Rentheim, her sister, also plans to use Erhart for the establishment of a symbolic form of immortality, by trying to persuade him to adopt her family name after she has died. The method of this thesis could be applied to works from any age of literature, but I have chosen the nineteenth century because of the particular social and intellectual influences that existed in Europe after the Enlightenment'. All the artistic movements of the nineteenth century were conditioned by the legacy of metaphysical uncertainty that the religious skepticism of the Age of Reason had bequeathed to the future. In these three works, the characters devote the same religious fervour to the worldly objects of their desires as, formerly, man had devoted to God. The unconscious hope in all their attempts is that they will discover a means of being delivered from death. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

En komparativ analys av dödsskildringar i två moderna romaner, Niels Lyhne skriven av J.P. Jacobsen och Stoner av John Williams. Diskuterar den moderna apokalypsen, utvecklingen från tidigmoderna till senmoderna romaner och Karl Jaspers gränsögonblick.