The Denial of Death Theme Analysis

Death surrounds Miranda. It confronts her in her dreams, in the funerals that fill the streets each day, in the ongoing war, and in the raging influenza pandemic that antagonizes her city and the rest of the world.  Yet she refuses to acknowledge death upfront, choosing instead to allude to death indirectly: consciously through humor, and unconsciously in her dreams. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter explores the pervasive fear of death that plagues humankind. Through Miranda’s staunch avoidance of death, Porter suggests that denying death is unproductive and even harmful, as it blocks the path towards a healthy acceptance of mortality. 

Miranda and Adam refuse to acknowledge the real possibility of death Adam faces as a soldier. The uncertainty of Adam’s future pains Miranda; to think that the man she’s falling in love with could be dead in a week, a month, or a year causes her great suffering. The solution she and Adam settle on is to not acknowledge death as a possibility. In place of explicit acknowledgement, they allude to death with dark humor. One such example is the couple’s jokes about the dangers of smoking. Although Adam smokes “continually,” he never fails to “explain to [Miranda] exactly what smoking [does] to the lungs.” Adam flaunts his contradictory behavior—smoking while being fully aware of its health risks—because he has bigger concerns to worry about. “Does it matter so much if you’re going to war, anyway?” he asks Miranda. Adam knows it’s highly likely that will die in combat, so the prospect of lung disease is hardly worrisome. Despite the darkness of their humor, though, an explicit nod to death is notably absent in the exchange. Miranda and Adam joke about a long-term concern (lung disease) in order to distract themselves from the horror of the short-term concern (the real possibility of Adam’s imminent death) lurks ominously before them. What’s more, pushing aside the possibility of Adam’s death doesn’t actually rid Miranda of her suffering; on the contrary, her avoidant behavior invites a new problem. Miranda’s fear of death ultimately distances her from her love. She remains guarded and tepid in her emotions, unable to love Adam as fully as she would like. Reflecting on her feelings for Adam, she says that “She liked him, she liked him, and there was more than this but it was no good even imagining, because he was not for her nor for any woman.” Adam is “not for her nor for any woman” because it’s highly likely he won’t be living for much longer. Miranda cannot bring herself to think of death in these real terms, though, so she ultimately closes herself off from thoughts of death and thoughts of love.

Miranda generally uses indirect, metaphorical language to contemplate death. Adam and Miranda discuss “what war does to the mind and heart,” and Miranda finds Adam’s blindly optimistic and simplistic viewpoint (he reasons that if he returns wounded it’s not the end of the world, only a case of bad “luck”) to be willfully naïve and avoidant. Miranda might criticize Adam’s statements about the harms of war, but she is also guilty of avoidant thinking, describing Adam as “Pure […] as the sacrificial lamb must be.” She cannot allow herself to imagine the reality of Adam’s death directly, so she evokes an archetypal construct (the sacrificial lamb) to contemplate his death in an indirect, less painful way. 

The only way Miranda can accept the reality of death is in the unconscious realm of her dreams and fevered hallucinations. This illustrates the fear she feels—and her intense desire to repress it. The story opens with a dream of death. In her dream, Miranda wakes up in a house that seems to be out of her past—she recalls “hanging about the place” with various relatives, and recognizes the bed in which she awoke to be her own. These familiar details are important because they show the reader that this dream and any messages it might convey are personally significant to Miranda. As she wakes (still inside the dream), Miranda instantly realizes that she must embark on an imminent journey to “outrun Death and the Devil.” Dream-Miranda’s explicit acknowledgement of death is common in her dreams but a rarity in her consciousness.

Throughout the story, when Miranda is conscious, she makes indirect references to death through humor or allusion (or in the case of the scene from which the story’s title is derived, through song). In contrast, when Miranda is unconscious, she contemplates death directly and productively. In constructing this binary, Porter suggests that a strategic avoidance of death is just as pervasive as the inevitability of death itself.