Oxford Journals subscribers can download the full text of an article on “An Existentialist Ars Moriendi: Death and Sacrifice in John Updike’s The Centaur,” which was first published in the August 12, 2014 issue of Literature and Theology.

Here’s the link, and the abstract:

“An Existentialist Ars Moriendi: Death and Sacrifice in John Updike’s The Centaur”
Michial Farmer, Assistant Professor of English, Crown College, St. Bonifacius, MN; michialfarmer@gmail.com

John Updike originally conceived his 1963 novel The Centaur as a companion piece to Rabbit, Run, published two years before. If the earlier novel was about a life-embracing man constitutionally unable to sacrifice himself for any person or idea, the later one is its opposite: a novel about a man obsessed with his own death who is nevertheless able to sacrifice himself for the betterment of his family. He thus exchanges his literal, physical death for a series of smaller, spiritual, daily deaths—the deaths of his dreams, his ambitions, everything but his love for his wife and son. What Updike is attempting in this novel, I will argue, is a 20th-century Ars Moriendi—an art of holy dying wherein George Caldwell will model a Christian attitude towards death and sacrifice. But Updike’s faith is always mixed with doubt, and thus his updated Ars Moriendi belongs firmly to the existentialist tradition wherein the black hole of death creates an inescapable anxiety. Updike implicitly adopts Martin Heidegger’s notion of Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death); to live authentically is to remember at all times that death is awaiting you. But, typically for Updike’s fiction, The Centaur charts a middle way: If Updike cannot resign himself to death with the calmness suggested by medieval Christianity, neither can he subscribe to Heidegger’s atheism. Caldwell’s daily sacrifices become a Christian response to this anxiety; by sacrificing himself every day, he prepares himself for the physical death that awaits him.