This paper addresses the narrative construction of the moment of death as depicted in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and in Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Following Orr’s definition of positive influence, described as a “site for cultural renewal”, it pursues the analysis of complexity and confluence of literary traditions in these texts. Though both Anna Karenina and The Sense of an Ending seem to insist on portraying a chronicle of struggle between a moment and a process of dying, it is nevertheless a physical moment of life ending which becomes an intensely condensed, and almost photographic, representation of the intimate, psychologically depicted, dying process. It is argued that the moment of death reveals, for instance, Anna’s unresolved internal conflict between psychological and physiological phenomena shaping human behaviour. Similarly, Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending builds upon a subtle dialogic tension between a process of psychological dying and a moment of physically conceived death. Specifically, this paper brings to light the repetitive occurence of the intense epiphanic moments which shape the thematic and the structural development of both Anna Karenina and The Sense of an Ending.
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