The narrator despises Givens but in fact despises a mirror reflection of himself because Givens, like him, is UNLOVEABLE.
1. What psychological profile of the narrator can we glean from the story’s first 3 pages? See page 5.
2. What “sin” is the narrator guilty of?
3. What is the connection between the narrator’s boss discovering his employee’s negligence and the narrator’s discovery that his father had died on page 6? Death is like “getting caught”; it creates a nervous laughter, a coping mechanism to treat our vulnerabilities and shortcomings as a joke.
4. How does the story divide the world into two groups on page 8? Those with a consciousness of death and those who don’t have such a consciousness.
5. What is the story’s major theme? See page 8.
6. What does the story say about having a healthy relationship with our own mortality? How can we turn this question into a thesis?
7. What evidence is there that the narrator is disaffected and disconnected from the human race? See page 9.
8. At the top of page 10, the narrator says to Givens: “Somebody’s imagining you dead. Thinking about it. The wish is father to the deed.” How are these words true?
9. Clearly, the narrator suspects Givens to be the culprit of the fraud. But his contempt for Givens goes further. Explain.
10. Find 3 similarities between the narrator and Givens. See page 10 and 11.
11. What does the dialogue at the bottom of page 10 and the top of page 11 say about American notions of success and failure?
12. Givens’ act of affirming his “loyalty” reveals what about him? Self-doubt.
13. On page 12, the narrator says he admires Givens for having experienced a “resurrection.” Is this true? What is the story saying about the manner in which we “resurrect” ourselves? We impose narratives, real or otherwise, that give our lives a narrative arc, a shape, a structure, a meaning, that defies the chaos, emptiness, and failure that afflicts us. We all wish to write our own flattering obituary in other words. Our capacity for self-delusion is infinite.
14. Is Givens’ confession the truth or simply uttered out of coercion?
Sample of Weak Thesis Statements That Suffer from Being Too Obvious or General:
“Mortals” is a story about death.
“Mortals” explores a man’s obsession with death.
Improved Thesis Statements:
“Mortals” is not a story about death or mortality; rather, it is a story about two failed lives, the narrator’s and Givens’, who, despising each other for their similarities, are both mired in self-pity and vain self-delusion alternated by grandiose bouts of self-pity.
The “resurrection” mentioned in the story is no resurrection at all; rather, it speaks to Givens’ desire to write his own obituary, for doing so enables him to gloss over his shortcomings, to exaggerate his strengths, and to impose an artificial narrative shape to his shapeless, meaningless, and unloveable existence.
Givens’ alleged “resurrection” is no resurrection at all. Rather, it is a chimera that enables him to gloss over his shortcomings, to exaggerate his strengths, and to impose an artificial narrative shape to his shapeless, meaningless existence.
The narrator is convinced that Givens called in his own obituary but in fact we have no definitive proof that Givens committed such a fraud. What is evident, however, is that the narrator is projecting his own failures onto Givens. These failures include a man who knows in his gut that he is squandering his existence on laziness, self-pity, and vain self-delusion and rather than face his shortcomings he would rather divert his energy to hating Givens.
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