Published in Tobias Wolff's The Night in Question, "Mortals," like many of Wolff's stories, seems to tell us that we are a pathetic race whose lives are unbearable without a certain degree of self-delusions to soothe us from our lives of banality, helplessness, vanity, and sheer terror. Specifically, a character, Givens, fakes his death so he can read his obituary. Givens sees himself as a failure, emasculated by his wife, generally disrespected by everyone, and sees his life as a feeble and useless one. His false obituary it seems is an attempt to resurrect his loathsome existence and transform him into Super Givens. Perhaps, Wolff's story is saying, we all carry a false obituary within us, a sort of self-aggrandizing version of our self, that tells us what we want to hear about ourselves: That we are good, that our lives are rich with meaning, that death cannot strip away the purpose of our vitality-filled lives. Moreover, we want to project our false obituaries, that is, our candy-coated versions of self, to others in order that we people admire us, not for who we really are but for the image people imagine us to be. This woeful condition is famously observed in Blaise Pascal's Pensees:
147. We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
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