The play’s pervasive subject matter is absolutely death.
The occasionally gruff, colloquial way of
the Death individual does not make him the
much less relentless and much less fearsome. The charac-
ters’ conversations and the Chorus’s songs are
complete of references to Charon, Acheron, Hades,
Death, and Orpheus. Orpheus, is a hero par-
ticularly relevant inside the gift context, as
a figure who tried (without success) to
retrieve his useless wife from the underworld.
The necessity of loss of life and of accepting one’s
demise even at the same time as appreciating life and the
sunlight of the world above often gives
the concern of aphorisms and choral interjec-
tions. This emphasis might seem peculiar or
unnecessary, for the reason that the central feature of th
