Comedy or tragedy? In this book we can encounter both.

Mostly, Being
Dead can be considered as an attempt for getting tragedy, though. Like
Sophocles tried to capture in his work, Crace also tries for following a
passion to its ultimate end. This fact is always present in this book.
Reading Being Dead we can perceive the need of trying to understand the
meaning of the live seeking for nature above all. Man has no power for
facing the fate.
The novel starts with pain; the author introduces a dead couple. Fate is
presented since the first moment in the novel so we appreciate how the life
cannot be changed because the end will always be unavoidable. Hence we
encounter with tragedy effect. It is a continue warfare that humankind has
in his life. The couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world
denies, defying even murder the narrator gives a chance for them after
being dead trying to lead the death; not let that it was a simple death but it
has worth. This scene seems to speak about the achievement over the fate,
that fatal murder. Till that moment in the plot the author describes thoughts
about life beyond dead. In the book, the reader can see how exists a
necessity of discovering if there is a paradise or another life after dead.
Otherwise, we can also perceive it as a little bit a comedy in the way of
thinking that if we feel sorry for something we considered as bad, there will
be something more that make us pay for we have made before therefore
Joseph and Celice feel sorry about the Festas death. The same way, many
actions create the comedy so the irrational ones do. A clear example is the
fact of returning to the place where they lived their passionate story when
they were young. It was the needy of feeling the madness of those years,
the folly of youth, a foolish attempt which carry them to death. As the essay
which have read, insinuates that the acts of the mankind gives us the
comedy effect because of its ignorance. This attempt would not bring them
the same feelings that they felt. The fact of dyeing naked is a way of show
the ridiculous of human being.
By one hand we can considerate the life as a comedy in which the human
plays a stupid role in this world being different from the animals and nature
but actually we are the similar instead, we are born and die as well as
nature does. The development of this plot goes from the comedy form the
youth to the tragedy of getting older, the dead. As the narrator says in the
book both want to give life meaning only because it clearly has none, other
than replicate and decompose what I dare say that we are completely
natural because all being are made of similarly, by cells and this true fact is
something impossible to defeat. The life is not in the human beings hand
(that is tragic), but the human can take the control of his life while he is
alive and defies at the present where sometimes we can appreciate comic
events in the human life. Basically, the book presents the life as a comedy
life with a tragic end, therefore life is a complete tragedy because it does
not matter how we fight against the fate, the death is faster than us and it
always wins.

For them, the comedy of marriage would not translate into the tragedy of
death
Pag.67
Cristina Snchez Silva