Essay On Stiff: Lives Of Human Cadavers

We live in a death-defying, death-denying society where the inevitable outcome is frequently prolonged through heroic measures and medicine. However, death is a very natural part of the circle of life. Through different genres of literature, death is often romanticized, challenging society's view of death. Through aspects of religion, love, and grief, death symbolizes the revival of life. In the non-fiction work, Stiff: Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach explores death and the human body and comments on the physical, religious, and social responses of surgeons, students, and experts to cadavers. Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, ponders the spirituality and truth about the aftermath of death, embodied in Hamlet’s father’s ghost and Yorick’s skull.
Although each work is from a different literary genre –non-fiction, a play, a poem– the value of human life is questioned, capitalizing on the revival quality of death rather than the assumption that death is the end of life.
In the non-fiction book, Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach challenges the status-quo by writing a detailed book about cadavers, or dead bodies. She highlights the fact that every human being will eventually be the cadaver, the remains of what once was a human being. Mary Roach begins her nonfiction book by letting the reader know that discussing cadavers doesn’t show disrespect because the cadaver does not reflect, spiritually, the person who died. She makes the distinction by saying, “One’s own dead are more than cadavers, they are place holders for the living. They are focus, receptacle, for emotions that no longer have one. The dead of science are always strangers.” (Roach 11-12). Mary Roach uses this to preface the flickers of humor that are present in a book that addresses a heavy topic. An important theme that usually accompanies death is grief, and the theme is no