The Death of Justina (1961). Summary and Description

John Cheever’s “The Death of Justina” is the first story in his fourth volume of short stories, Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, which was published in 1961. This story, which comments on itself and on writing in general (literary critics often label such works metanarratives—stories that comment on the process of making and interpreting stories), includes many first-person observations. It also contains many of the themes found in Cheever’s earlier works: the absurdity of the social and occupational demands in the postwar, “postmodern” world; the mutual self-delusions of marriage and mortality; the inhuman essence of our bureaucratic society; and, perhaps most importantly, the role of fiction and art in our lives.

“The Death of Justina” is written from the first- person point of view of Moses Wapshot, one of the protagonists of Cheever’s novel The Wapshot Chronicle. This story appeared in 1961, four years after The Wapshot Chronicle was published, and some critics have complained that even though the narrator is obviously Moses Wapshot, the Moses of this story retains few, if any, of the original Moses characteristics. As the tale opens, Moses laments how time and change confound “one’s purest memories and ambitions”; he questions our ability to understand the times in which we live, claiming that in order to overcome chaos, we must rely on art, especially fiction.

Even so, he wonders whether “in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.” Here, we perhaps hear the author’s voice blending with the voice of the protagonist: Both individuals wonder whether fiction’s ability to capture the essence of its time somehow limits its chances of overcoming chaos because the “selection” of what to include and what to exclude may not fully communicate its message across changing times.

After challenging readers to look into their own past for examples of Moses’s ideas of ubiquitous chaos, Moses describes how his doctor has recently advised him to quit smoking and drinking, and he catalogs the problems he encounters in trying to do so. He then explains that his wife’s cousin, Justina, has arrived for a visit, and though she appears “lively,” she unexpectedly dies on his couch while he is at work. When he tells his boss that he must leave work early because of the family emergency, his boss commands him to finish his work on the upcoming Elixircol commercial before he leaves (another coworker has already left to assist his grandmother, who has fallen off a stepladder).

Ironically, Elixircol is hailed as “the true juice of youth.” Moses writes the commercial while elucidating his own preoccupation with life, mortality, and the difficulties of growing older. His first version of the commercial includes claims that Elixircol can rejuvenate its users’ sexuality, their sense of well-being, and even their perceptions of their spouses; he ends the commercial with the actress’s encouraging potential users to “borrow [the cash] from your neighborhood loan shark or hold up a bank.”

When he arrives home and phones the family doctor to find out how he should deal with Justina’s corpse, Moses learns that his home is located in “Zone B.” He also discovers that after a hasty Village Council meeting moved to shut down a proposed funeral home in the area, the council members went too far and mandated that “you not only can’t have a funeral home in Zone B—you can’t bury anything there and you can’t die there.” Here, we see other themes common in Cheever’s work—the absurdity and inhumanity of governing bureaucracies and the culture’s attempts to avoid acknowledging or encountering death.

In their attempts to appease the wishes of the masses, bureaucracies often overlook not only individual problems but also problems that everyone will have to face. In fact, when Moses petitions the mayor to grant him an exception, the mayor tells him, “But it’s just that it happened in the wrong zone and if I make an exception for you I’ll have to make an exception for everyone and this kind of morbidity, when it gets out of hand, can be very depressing. People don’t like to live in a neighborhood where this sort of thing goes on all the time.” Significantly, Moses faces the inevitability and reality of death that our culture often tries to downplay.

After obtaining the exception, Justinais “removed,” and Moses dreams that he is in a supermarket where nothing is labeled and all the items are indiscernible, wrapped in “odd shapes.” Proceeding toward the checkout, Moses notices that there are “brutes” waiting at the door, and they tear open each customer’s packages. Once they see what they were actually purchasing, “in every case the customer, at the sight of what he had chosen, showed all the symptoms of the deepest guilt; that force that brings us to our knees.” Coupled with Moses’s last two attempts to write the Elixircol commercial, the first of which claims that “only Elixircol can save you” from the “lethal atomic waste” in the air and the second of which quotes Psalm 23, the dream represents our inability to comprehend death and our inability to understand how many decisions do not have their intended results.

In the final scene, Cheever highlights all the themes he explores in this piece by describing the cemetery where Justina is buried as a place “where [the dead] are transported furtively as knaves and scoundrels and where they lie in an atmosphere of perfect neglect. Justina’s life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.” Here, Cheever emphasizes how the fear of death creates bureaucracies to deal with unwanted problems (e.g., the Village Council) and creates occupations (such as morticians and cemetery attendants) further to distance us, the living, from ever having to confront mortality. Of course, Moses’s many failed attempts to market Elixircol tie into these ideas very nicely; Moses himself promotes a product that profits from people’s fear of death.

Cheever’s selection of specific, meaningful instances from Moses’s chaotic life mirrors the way art can overcome the apparent chaos of human experience. The commercial and his bosses’ unwillingness to accommodate his family emergency, his aunt’s death, his doctor’s admonitions concerning smoking and drinking, his concerns about his own life choices, and his dream all deal with the themes of mortality and the absurdity of the modern human experience. Cheever’s selections show us a man dealing with intertwined, unavoidable issues. Although it seems as though every facet of Moses’s existence ties into these themes, Moses still struggles to overcome the complexities of mortality, absurdity, and the chaos contained therein. As Moses puts it, “How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?”

For Discussion or Writing
1. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explores some themes that are found in “The Death of Justina,” including an examination of our fear of death and our myriad ways of avoiding contact with it. Write a well-developed essay that compares the two works and the “fear of death” theme.

2. This story also explores the absurdity of U.S. commercial enterprises by contrasting their claims with the everyday reality that Moses experiences. Read Don DeLillo’s White Noise, noting the many references to commerce, advertisements, and popular culture. Finally, write a well-developed essay that compares the way the two authors deal with societies bombarded by advertising.