Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer prize–winning novelthe road(2006) addresses the cliché that at the moment of death the endangered individual experiences a “life review” during which his life “flashes before his eyes.” McCarthy's protagonist intuits that “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death” (18). Thus, in the view of McCarthy's...
Whitman's “Song of Myself” has long been considered a loosely organized, perhaps even chaotic poem which is held together, if at all, by his own robust personality. He himself may have contributed to this concept of the poem. Untitled when it appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, it was called “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in the 1856 edition; “Walt Whitman” in the...